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The original was posted on /r/2007scape by /u/ILikeToRant1 on 2025-07-03 13:50:18+00:00.
Okay I know this concept isn't anything new and it has been talked about to death but I'm bored and I was also a wow player for almost 10 years before hopping back to osrs and I wanted to give some of my thoughts on it.
I've had the idea of discussing objective advantages and disadvantages when it comes to comparing osrs to wow especially with all the wow players now trying osrs but since I'm not a youtuber or anything, I never felt the incentive to make a video essay out of it so I'm just gonna post it here for fun.
I played wow for about 10 years before coming back to osrs. I used to play wow and Runescape at the same time from 2009-2012 where I stopped playing Runescape due to EOC getting released. I continued playing WoW up until battle for azeroth where I got super burnt from WoW and decided to give OSRS a shot again since I had a friend who was playing it and it made me remember my childhood. I've been playing OSRS ever since.
The amount of objective advantages I noticed when playing osrs were so massive that I could never go back to playing WoW again. Everytime I tried to give WoW another shot, especially when a new expansion came out, I'd stop playing within maybe two weeks. So here's a list of reasons as to why WoW frustrates me so much as a game compared to osrs.
Pricing:
Every time WoW releases a new expansion, you'd have to buy it for 60$ which is basically a triple A game and still continue paying 15$ subscription on top of that while OSRS gets updated regularly without the player having to pay a dime extra outside of their monthly subscription.
Servers & Realms:
Your characters are locked to the server and realm you picked forever unless you pay a fee of 25$ per character to swap their realm on the same server.
As far as I know, it is impossible to swap servers. I experienced this first hand as I moved from the middle east to NA and I could not transfer my wow account from EU to NA servers at all. I couldn't even pay to get it done, meaning I'd have to make a new account, buy the latest expansion again and all my progress reset back to complete 0.
Server swapping in osrs is as simple as clicking an icon in a tab and your character immediately gets put into the server of your choosing in any region.
Timegates:
This is one of my biggest issues with WoW and the main reason I stopped playing the game. You're only allowed to do the daily quests once per day. Only allowed to complete a raid once per week. A heroic dungeon once per day. A mythic dungeon once per week. Earn a set amount of pvp points per week etc. The game hard locks the amount of progression you can make each week which feels insulting as you're paying a subscription, and it feels like the devs are also restricting how much you can play per the month your paying for.
The game forces you to stop doing that piece of content till enough time has passed and it is so backwards making it feel like you log in to do your chores rather than enjoy the game whenever you want. It actually exposes how little content there is within a new expansion that we pay 60$ for because they have to force you to stop playing for long before you realize it.
When I was a main raider for my guild in legion. I would only log on twice a week on the raid nights to complete the raid for the week and the highest mythic+ dungeon we had and logged off as I was done with my chores. It makes it feel even worse if you miss a week because you can't make up for it the next week. Thankfully, OSRS has basically 0 timegates for any content.
Legacy Content:
Legacy content in WoW basically does not exist as much as I would love if it did. Outside of obtaining cosmetics and achievements, doing content outside of the current expansion will not contribute to the progression of your character which is a shame as the previous expansions have such sick and well designed content that basically become irrelevant as soon as the new content drops.
This often even applies to the current expansion being played. When a new raid gets released within the same expansion, it immediately powercreeps the previous raid via item level and the previous raids get immediately overshadowed by the new one and outside of niche items, it will be optimal to just farm the new raid and ignore the previous ones.
OSRS keeping legacy content relevant is probably a huge reason why it can afford to not have any timegates in the game. By keeping legacy content relevant, it keeps so much content in the game that even without timegates, players will often play for decades without even coming close to completing the game on just one account. There is also no rush to log in to do the weekly/daily content of the game out of fear of missing out and players can take their time enjoying the game to the fullest.
Conclusion:
To me, OSRS does these categories OBJECTIVELY better and it does it so much better that it's crazy. I know there are nuances to each of these like some people can still prefer timegates to no timegates (I cannot imagine why), but I wanted to put a spotlight on how outdated WoW feels as a game with how it is handled. I didn't want to go into subjective things like combat or music or the content itself because those have been talked about plenty and I don't thing these issues have been talked about enough.
Feel free to add to this list with anything you can come up with even if it's an advantage WoW has over OSRS.
Anyway thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.
