RuneScape, Woodcutting, and Modern Lessons
If you’ve ever spent countless hours in RuneScape chopping down trees, gathering a mountain of logs, and wondering when you’ll level up, then congratulations — you’ve unknowingly trained for the harsh realities that the world throws at you today. I’m serious. The simple, repetitive act of leveling up your woodcutting skill might have given you a head start in understanding some of the core principles that govern not just virtual economies but real-world ones, too. So what did RuneScape teach us?
Patience is the most overpowered skill.
Nobody maxed out their woodcutting skill overnight. The grind was long, monotonous, and let’s not forget that you had to dodge random events and people trying to trim your armor. But all of that taught us to sit and wait. It taught us patience.
Spending hours at the same spot around Varrock with a steady hand on your rune axe wasn’t just about accumulating experience points; it was a lesson in delayed gratification. You’d sit there, watching your experience bar crawl upward ever so slowly, just for that sweet, sweet dopamine hit when you finally leveled up. You’d take your yew logs to the Grand Exchange and sell them by the note. If you did this for long enough, you made enough to buy that Zamorak armor! Subconsciously, you learned that progress is gradual, and in the end, persistence pays off.
Fast forward to modern life as an adult, I’ve seen those subconscious lessons shine through in people’s lives. Specifically in the crypto community, I’ve seen many successful traders attribute their trading ability to RuneScape. This isn’t just some one-off occurrence, either. It’s a real trend within the community with hundreds of people to back it up. Whether it’s chopping yew logs and taking them back and forth to the GE or sitting tightly watching Bitcoin get manipulated by global fearmongering and cutely timed financial disclosures, the core principle is the same:
Sometimes you just have to be patient.
For many of us, the Grand Exchange was our first exposure to a trading market with supply and demand economics. To an extent, some of us might have even seen market manipulation in action (until Jagex stepped in)!
In real-world financial markets, the lessons are very similar. You have to know when to buy dips and when to sell to secure profit. Obviously, studying academic resources can teach you some of this stuff on paper, but RuneScape is where you got hands-on experience with this while your brain was a malleable learning machine. In truth, RuneScape might’ve subconsciously taught you more than 8–12 weeks of lecture could.
You also learned to be skeptical.
If you played RuneScape, you probably fell victim to some kind of scam at least once. You know, that classic “free armor trimming” scam where you trusted someone with your hard-earned rune platebody, only for them to log out. Or the infamous doubling scam where someone promises to double your gold if you just trade them first.
They taught us that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Unfortunately, the crypto world has its fair share of scam artists too. From pump-and-dump schemes to shady initial coin offerings (ICOs), the parallels are striking. Just like in RuneScape, the promise of easy profit can blind even the most experienced players. However, those that played RuneScape, tend to see this stuff from afar. If something shines like gold, looks like gold, feels like gold, it could still be a sack of shit!
Scams aren’t just localized to a small community, either. Sometimes the scams can catch everyone off-guard, like we saw with FTX and LUNA. Unfortunately, some people got ALL their armor “trimmed” by SBF and his smelly sex cult. Hopefully it was a good lesson!
To sum it all up:
RuneScape wasn’t just a game; it was a training ground for future entrepreneurs and traders. It gave us a sandbox to play in, to fail in, and to learn from. It taught us that the grind never stops, whether you’re chopping down yews in any given spot or patiently watching a market nuke.
So the next time you hear someone dismiss video games as a waste of time, remind them that somewhere out there, a former RuneScape player is applying those same skills to turn a profit in the digital gold rush of the 21st century. They’re probably sitting on 7–8 figures of an L1. And they probably still have a full bank of logs in their account, too.
