So true. My first thought was this as well. I'm about the same age as you and played RS at much the same time. Personally the experience was greatest due to the huge black market community. Hell, I even first learned to code in order to bot RS. Learned a lot of the exact same lessons (Trading and bartering, getting scammed, talking to people to get help moving forward) but in real life and with real money.
I still haven't gotten over suddenly getting banned from PayPal for selling virtual goods when I was 14. The ~$1000 USD I had made, pretty much all the money to my name, was held hostage for 6 months!
Thats too funny. And honestly, the fact that the game translates to the real world directly like that just blows my mind. I met a guy at a hackthon during uni who ran Sals realm of runescape. He told me that the selling the website basically payed his (canadian) tuition in full
Ditto. AutoRune and later SCAR, Sleepwalker, et al were huge inspirations to teenage me. I spent a lot of time bugging Dylock and Kaitnieks for Delphi help over IRC.
When I had some downtime a year or so ago, it was really interesting to revisit the reverse-engineered clients (a la RuneBot, PowerBot, etc) and taking a look at how that was done then and now. Actually made me somewhat working with Java again.
Very cool to see other folks who found themselves on a similar path thanks to that community!
I still haven't gotten over suddenly getting banned from PayPal for selling virtual goods when I was 14. The ~$1000 USD I had made, pretty much all the money to my name, was held hostage for 6 months!