I guess in order to justify a conclusive analysis, each of these players who claim to enjoy grinding in and of itself should be interviewed individually.
—Acid Soul, Grinding Mentality Revisited @ 12:04
The most consistent critique of Embrace the skilling timer from skillers has been, “No thanks, I don’t want skilling to become a PvM clone.” Fair enough. On what should not be copied, I only offered one distinction: output randomness. Too much was left unsaid, so let me say it here.
What is skilling’s identity? Why do skillers like skilling? What distinguishes it from other avenues of the game?
“Nobody really knows” is not good enough. If we’re in the business of changing things, then ignorance is malice by other means. We would, in the process of building something new and hopefully improved, sooner or later destroy something precious. And nobody would ever notice.
Previously, I searched for a definitive answer: what is the drive that motivates a skiller? But every candidate I saw elided something skillers hold dear. Their answers often don’t overlap; some are even in conflict. There’s no single, unifying drive. Rather, there’s a poorly drawn map of them.
The task is twofold: finishing the map, and then picking out the useful parts. It is of course accurate to say that “progression” motivates most skillers, even strongly so, but this is a pedestrian observation. It doesn’t tell us when we’re about to trample on something by mistake. So here is the test: a drive is only notable here if it violates an orthodoxy of game design.
I’m not here to bore you, so I’ll spare you the whole messily annotated map, but some things that fail this test: juice, integration, affordance, ludonarrative coherence, achievements, balance, and every PvM lesson from Embrace the skilling timer. Failing this test doesn’t mean “don’t work on these.” They’re orthodox for a reason: the ideas are reliably good. But they aren’t special.
Preservationism passes this test, but in pure form all it says is “don’t change anything ever.” Perfectly respectable. Not very helpful to a designer. It can’t tell you how to remedy a harmful change proposal. It can’t show you which tradeoffs are happening, and where. It just says no.
What’s left on the map I’ve arranged into four pillars. Each pillar generates specific and unique objections to change proposals. Each pillar has a conflict with each of the others. Think of them less as “types of skillers” and more as structures that uphold skilling’s identity.
Is there anyone out there who plays RS just because they enjoy the minimalistic aspect of it? You could ask whether someone could actually enjoy the repetitive gameplay and consider it to be the primary aspiration in this game.
Well, as for myself, I nowadays enjoy the grind a lot because… I find it very therapeutic. Being in control of something is very rewarding and not having to swell with the complex worries of life too much is a pretty neat aspect as well.
—Acid Soul, Grinding Mentality Revisited @ 9:20
The attention-cultivator uses the game as a tool to enter flow state, to assist meditation, or merely to occupy their devilish hands. Central to all of these is attention, its texture and the demands on it by the game and the internal experience cultivated by harnessing it.
This skiller wants the game to be both present and absent, both distracting and undemanding—a channel that draws in attention but does not rattle it. A conflict? Yes, but not a contradiction. The key to satisfying this type is not disturbing the flow.
Here the naive designer errs: the cleanest way to build engagement is tension. That slow build-up of anticipation as you progress from wave to wave in a raid or boss fight, while immensely satisfying when it crashes against a cliff at its climax, is not exactly the most stable channel for attention to flow through. Perhaps channels don’t belong in the surf.
In game designer language, there shouldn’t be accumulating state that a mistake can empty. That’s what happens when you die to a boss. All the work that had been done up until that point—all the damage you’d dealt, phases you’d been through, potions and food you’d consumed—is thrown away.
Just go and do some ardy course, choose a staring point in the middle of the screen, and there you go. It’s just subconscious autopilot doing the agility in the corner of your eye for you. At least that’s how creepy it gets for me sometimes. [15:39] It’s almost like a micro-sleeping type of state of mind.
—Acid Soul, Grinding Mentality Revisited @ 10:49
This subconscious autopilot, this complete mastery of a technique, is something orthodoxy tries to prevent via dynamic difficulty. Why? For most players seeking self-mastery, when there’s no more challenge, the game is finished. For this skiller, that’s when the game begins.
I’m working on 200m Fishing and Cooking when I’m actively playing the game […] I’m also AFK Woodcutting and Firemaking at yews and I do that like a lot of hours a day while working and doing IRL stuff […] so I’m working on basically four 200 mils at once.
—Autumn Elegy, Sae Bae Cast 121 @ 8:47
“No XP waste.” This is the mantra of the lifestyle-engineer. This skiller plans out their journey in detail, optimizing an array of constraints to arrive at something that works for them. Despite being stereotyped as obsessed with efficiency, they welcome variety: it’s just another constraint to solve for.
each skill has a different feeling to it and requires a different mentality and playstyle. when going for max/200m all you are making a plan of which skills to do first, where to make money for buyables, which skills you afk when not home etc. The player has to make decisions on a macro level but also learn the micro management of each of the chosen methods for each skill.
—he box jonge, Discord correspondence
This skiller’s grinds are measured not in hours and days, but in months and years—a timescale where engineering becomes essential and where orthodox game design stops caring. Before then, it’s just the game as everyone enjoys it, where new discoveries are always around the corner and experienced as delight, rather than as an affront to a plan that was previously sound.
What’s often misunderstood here is that the constraints are human ones and “efficiency” comes in many forms. Hourly XP and GP rates are only two. How should I get 200m Construction? “Do gnome benches,” you might say. “I hear there’s an even faster flatpack method now.” But perhaps this is intolerable to me. That tolerance is as much a constraint as time—as are attention, stamina, and health. Blocking off an entire week to make gnome benches is not very efficient if after 30 minutes your hand explodes.
From this we get the appeal of low-intensity skilling: levers to optimize for these human constraints.
This pillar is where the unofficial 20-minute AFK cap rule comes from. 6-hour AFK Guthan’s, Duke Mining, and splashing all created a degenerate strategy. Once you’re at the “you can literally get XP in your sleep” stage, the effort-to-reward lever is broken. There’s nothing to optimize. Every account just reduces to “how long have you been playing?”
It’s where resistance to methods like drift net (EHP for two skills at once, by design) comes from. It’s why people say bird houses have ruined Hunter; meanwhile they adore Farming. Both collapse two skills into one. Bird houses take Hunter, a skill with a wide variety of training methods, and turn it into Farming. Every skill uniquely fitting into different areas of your life is part of what makes the optimization process fun and the lifestyle-engineer’s plan theirs.
And it’s where some of the resistance to XP rate powercreep comes from. What if they’re in the middle of a plan? “I did 1,000 hours of this grind. Now that’s only 680 hours of XP. I wish I’d waited.” This is a real injury. As silly as it might seem to you, that feels like 320 hours—8 weeks of full-time work—wasted.
“What, so we can’t increase meta XP rates for a skill ever?” Don’t be so defeatist! Try announcing the change in advance. If Jagex says, “In 2028 Q3, we’re going to buff meta XP rates for [skill-you-hate],” the lifestyle-engineer can plan around that. No more injury.
Autumn Elegy does exactly this on Lost City, happily planning around a known-in-advance powercreep schedule.
I’ll just be gradually working on 200m Fishing over the next few years probably as like a passive AFK skill. I think it’s my best choice because Woodcutting is going to get teak trees in 2005¹, which for both AFK and active are like twice as fast as existing methods.
¹ refers to the historical RS2 patch timeline the preservation server aims to emulate
—Autumn Elegy, My 5-year Runescape plan @ 0:55
Should every skill have an AFK method? This is often asked, and the lifestyle-engineer has a decisive answer: No. A more precise form of this question: Should every skill have the same effort-to-reward ratio? If this happens—if every skill gets a redwood equivalent—optimizing a max plan or any other long-term journey becomes almost trivial. Just ignore every other constraint and AFK everything. It doesn’t quite break the lever like 6-hour methods do, but it does make the plans no longer personal.
In the 2005 London Marathon, Paula Radcliffe, with five million people watching on TV, “veered towards the side of the road and squatted down,” The Guardian reports.
“I was losing 10 seconds every mile because my stomach was cramping,” said Radcliffe. “I had to stop and go. I felt ropey around the 16-mile mark but went on for too long. I didn’t want to have to resort to that in front of thousands of people.”
The pit stop was completed in a time any formula one team would have been proud of it. It only cost Radcliffe about 15 seconds […]
With roughly a million dollars on the line, she proceeded to win the race.
This can be a gruesome reality for the endurance-athlete, the skiller who chases performance measured by time-bound XP rates (hourly, 6h logs, 24h grinds, etc.) separately from total account XP.
You could probably max normal 3t [f2p] Woodcutting at 80–85K an hour […] Once you start getting into 2.6, we optimized it to the point where we could just scrape 100K an hour […] Some of us like to compete in trying for the best Woodcutting hour and that was something I found enjoyable.
Ben3143, he played mobile-only and he did a Woodcutting hour that nobody could beat. It was just actually ridiculous. I don’t remember what it was exactly, but he did like 103 or 104K or something crazy like that. He’s very skilled.
—Pawz, Sae Bae Cast 266 @ 10:50
Contrary to the lifestyle-engineer, this skiller wants a challenge that never truly ends. If a record is unbeatable, if there’s no room for improvement, then there’s nothing left to run for. Thus the distinction—PvM challenges are mostly sprints (speedruns) or courses (CAs, Inferno, Colosseum, Blorva). Skilling challenges are distance runs.
Contrary to the attention-cultivator, this skiller revels in tension. Imagine the last stretch of a 6h log, the preceding hours all stacked up behind you as you inch towards the finish line, the whole time knowing that even a minor stumble could have it all be for nothing. Overcoming that slow, haunting agony is, as masochistic as it seems to the crowd, the whole appeal.
Going on the same world every day you’d be seeing the same nerds […] I miss that kind of thing […] a community of people doing the same thing you are […] a clan is great, don’t get me wrong, but like a natural occurrence of people meeting each other in the game.
—Pawz, Sae Bae Cast 266 @ 1:04:46It feels better when you see other people sail around […] the overall vibe is better when you see others, but the gameplay will be slightly worse.
—he box jonge, Sae Bae Cast 260 @ 1:03:00Maybe there’ll be some cool old school skilling going on in that server and even if I’m not playing it super hard it’ll be cool to watch.
—Autumn Elegy, Is skilling dead? @ 31:43It’s been really cool to meet some of you while skilling. Sometimes I’ve been more chatty and sometimes a bit less, but all in all these encounters and conversations have been most motivating.
—Acid Soul, The Sleeper Wakes @ 2:40
The way-fellow goes their own way, but likes company too—others to regale with struggles, exploits, and triumphs; or merely to exchange a downward nod. It’s a shared practice, a group that needs no membership. Knowing that every chunk in Gielinor might have a fellow skiller chopping trees, catching fish, or harvesting herbs makes gearing up and joining in just a little bit easier and a little more pleasant.
Resistance from this skiller is often soft and uncoordinated. Knock down one of their temples; they’ll go find a new one rather than fight over it. And this happens a lot, because presence without relation is an unusual social order. In PvM, other people are teammates. In PvP, they’re obstacles. With skilling, they’re just there.
Orthodox MMO design says the remedy is to make the game world feel more alive. But it’s easy to create guild systems, competitive arenas, and co-op mechanics to force social interaction; hubs where everyone congregates. It’s hard to get people to just be there, out in the world.
Conflict with the lifestyle-engineer is minor and rarely manifests as policy, but the “No XP waste” mantra is at odds here. The lifestyle-engineer has no time to stop for a chat. They’re AFK at shooting stars, doing something else in the outside world; or they’re too locked in at bloodwood trees, no APM to spare for typing.
The way-fellow’s conflicts often become policy when the other pillars want things to be more predictable. Those spontaneous interactions the way-fellow adores are often an affront to the endurance-athlete and attention-cultivator, both of whom prefer minimal disturbances.
Consider the community’s demand for Hallowed Sepulchre to have private instances. For the endurance-athlete and attention-cultivator, this is a no-brainer improvement. Each floor starting at the same point in the cycle makes each run more consistent, and even though this makes it easier, it’s still difficult enough to satisfy them. But for the way-fellow, this is a catastrophe. Now everyone is in their own little box, forever.
In popular skilling discourse, these pillars are not given equal weight. Far more skillers resonate with the lifestyle-engineer and way-fellow than they do with the attention-cultivator and endurance-athlete. Because resistance from the way-fellow is soft, most heated debates occur when the lifestyle-engineer conflicts with the other two. So here we have an explanation for almost every controversy in skilling—and for who “wins”.
Take the perennial gnome cube debate. For the lifestyle-engineer, wrist injury is not a constraint that can be planned around. It’s a barrier to entry. It’s locking them out of a lever they could otherwise pull, preventing access to certain high-attention, high-XP training methods. They want that barrier lowered by reducing the clicks.
This conflicts with the attention-cultivator, who needs their hands sufficiently occupied, doesn’t want dynamic difficulty, doesn’t want to re-master anything, feels as if the knife click adds something valuable, and—most crucially—is already humble enough to answer “You don’t have to use it” with “I could not help myself.”
That these reasons sound wishy-washy is part of the problem. To the lifestyle-engineer, it reads as intransigence. With both numbers on their side and an articulable injury, they get absolute confidence in their position, and yet no gnome cube.
“Brain damage,” says a comment with 45 likes on a video with 48. “really good use of your time” “stop bro. ur maxed” “can i ask what your day to day life is like that you can play like this?” These are comments from the lifestyle-engineer. The endurance-athlete posts a world-record 6h Mining run. The comments reply: Your life does not appear well-optimized.
The contempt cannot contain itself. The worst of it comes from a 2019 incident where a skiller named Oslo, striving for a 24h Smithing record, shits his own pants instead of taking a toilet break. The headline is that he didn’t even win, finishing behind the record holder by over an hour of on-pace XP. It was the worst sin of all: he debased himself for nothing.
It’s easy to point and laugh. I certainly did when I first heard the story. And, on closer inspection, if anyone in the community deserves such derision, he does. But I can’t help but notice how this story still echoes many years later, that I—someone who didn’t start playing until 2025—heard it within my first month. What should’ve been an embarrassing anecdote of personal failure, laughed off with self-deprecating humour and quietly forgotten, has been elevated to community lore. And that lore has a function. It tells us what we believe as a community.
The message of this lore, as it is told by the lifestyle-engineer, is that the endurance-athlete is debased and disreputable and should be disregarded. It canonizes Oslo as the endurance-athlete. It’s a cudgel wielded without care or restraint, directed at a political enemy.
This same story, if told by the endurance-athlete, would be very different. There would be no schadenfreude. It is not a happy story. It has no names. It’s a cautionary tale, a story of what happens when you aren’t prepared. It’d come with remedies attached, regardless of how gory the details: have a poop bag ready, eat lots of fibre so you can shit faster, and do the maths first on if that time save is even worth it.
In the outside world, this is a readily accepted part of endurance sports. That’s why Paula Radcliffe was even able to do what she did, why she felt as though she had permission: because she did. The crowd didn’t laugh, it gasped. Her story was told by the endurance-athlete, because in her community that’s all there is.
Oslo’s story, told by the endurance-athlete, is the 50km race walk at the 2016 Olympics. Over halfway into the race and with a healthy lead, “The French world record holder appeared to lose control of his bowels on the course,” Daily News writes. “At the 35K mark, [he] keeled over and collapsed onto the pavement.” He finished eighth.
While this incident is a mild stain on his career, if you search for him, it’s only one story of many, flushed by his other achievements. When it does appear, it’s coated in euphemisms. You don’t get “that guy who shat himself and didn’t even win.” And the sport—still struggling for legitimacy—didn’t get saddled with the permanent mark of “that sport where they shit themselves.” It’s still “that sport where they walk funny.”
Polling culture turns these conflicts into politics. “We only need 70% to win. Our proposals don’t need consensus.” Each treats the other as an enemy to suppress, not a person to listen to. Little regard is given to how content actually gets added into the game.
We only ever poll things that are going to pass. […] The actual value of polling is the things that aren’t allowed to be done because they’d never pass in the first place.
—Mod Rice, How to fix Oldschool Runescape’s biggest issues @ 1:21:25
Polling does not approve changes. It rejects them. You don’t get changes into the game with a poll; you do it by convincing Jagex to put them to one. And the easiest response they can give to any campaign, especially a controversial one, is “We’ll look into it.” Doing nothing costs nothing and risks nothing. It’s the default. If we want Jagex to embrace and reform skilling, consensus is not optional.
Fortunately, consensus is possible once you have the right instrument. These pillars agree on almost everything. That’s why they all happily call each other skillers. Only, I’ve deliberately arranged them to highlight conflicts, because doing so makes them useful. Allow me to demonstrate.
The Abandoned Mine excavation from my last essay has endurance-athlete written all over it: time-bound scoring, increased skill ceiling, and instancing to level the playing field. (Quick recap on the proposal: instanced Mining site that collapses in a 20-minute loop, possessed mine carts you have to dodge, three separate routes, and a live scoreboard.) It didn’t occur to me at the time, but that’s the pillar I most strongly resonate with, so my designs naturally lean towards it.
But what do the other pillars have to say?
The attention-cultivator has concerns about the carts. How much time do I have to react to them? How annoying is it if I get hit? It sounds stressful enough, and now there’s a timer and a scoreboard on the screen as well!
Part of the issue here is bad communication. I didn’t explain the finer details of the cart dodging, but it most readily brings to mind the Treus Dayth fight from Haunted Mine, which is incredibly frustrating. I should’ve noted that you’ll have ample time to react and that getting hit is only a minor setback; that the scoreboard can be hidden.
But there is still the issue of the timer itself, of the mine collapsing on a 20-minute schedule. I made sure the punishment is small, but it’s still there. And the greater injury is that being thrown back into the lobby disrupts the flow. There’s no simple remedy here, but one is possible, which I’ll go over later.
The lifestyle-engineer has concerns about XP rate powercreep. I didn’t put hard numbers on it, but you’d expect a notable XP rate buff over 3t4g, in line with the increased difficulty. (This is an injury for the endurance-athlete as well. It invalidates prior records. Could be remedied with a leaderboard snapshot, like with Sailing, but that’s better left for exceptional circumstances.)
The remedy here is abandoning the powercreep. It doesn’t need that to survive: it’s already competing with 3t4g by letting you bank the ores and being more engaging. It can just match the XP rates as closely as possible, aiming for very slightly under. Maybe it can be tuned to output more runite ore instead, moving some of the XP reward to economic output.
The way-fellow has concerns about the box. More minigame slop, they lament. Although the instancing is not private—something I added to appeal to this pillar—it’s still an injury, because it’s still a box.
The failure here is mostly of scope. Classic rocks are competitive. Mining them means you can be crashed, and none of the pillars want that, but the endurance-athlete especially doesn’t. So instancing is a remedy to that, and it’s a localized fix, because the scope of a single proposal is best kept local.
The real fix, one that not only removes the desire for instancing here but satisfies the way-fellow far more universally: make classic rocks not competitive. No more per-world timer for these resources. Just a per-player one. (This would, incidentally, remove world hopping—which everyone hates—from any Mining gameplay loop.)
Assuming we can get that done, watch how many issues disappear. Right away it dissolves a pretty gnarly implementation issue that I’d previously glossed over: how exactly does the designer make sure all three routes are equally viable? Well, now they don’t have to! Now it’s a routing puzzle for players to solve.
And with this, we can satisfy the endurance-athlete without creating this awkward 20-minute collapsing mine loop. No more collapsing mine. No more box that grates on the way-fellow, and no more timer that grates on the attention-cultivator. It’s just a regular mining site in the overworld with two unique mechanics.
The intended function of the collapse can now be handled by the scoreboard. We can even turn it off by default. Click the sign out front to make it appear, or to reset your score. It shows everyone’s hourly rate and time since last reset, e.g. “120K/hr – 17 minutes.” You can change how it sorts (rate or run time), or add a filter for minimum run time. In fact, the scoreboard is now so generic that it could be added to any Mining site in the game; now there’s only one unique mechanic.
You might notice you can now join or leave a race at any time, no coordination required. So we’ve not just remedied things for the way-fellow but given them something they like. And the revised design is tighter for the endurance-athlete too: the previous one was somewhat hostile even to them, only permitting a 20-minute distance run—no option to go for anything longer.
I hope you can forgive me the sin of exhuming my own stillborn design proposal. The point of this exercise was not resurrecting it or convincing you of its merit; it was to demonstrate what these pillars do. I wrote that proposal only two months ago. Here, armed with these pillars, I identified and remedied multiple serious flaws in it, all in a few hours. And they perform the autopsy: the design only appealed to one small pillar, and even for them it wasn’t perfect. No canvassing or consulting required. I didn’t suddenly become a better designer. I just had a better instrument.
The more productive use: direct these pillars at Jagex’s own proposals, and the ones you submit to them.