People buying gold for real life money has literally always been happening behind the scenes (yes in 2007 as well), so again I have no issues with this. With membership bonds it even removes gold from an inflated economy. It seems to me though that you want a version of the game exactly how it was in 2007, in which case you’re SoL

I don’t understand your last paragraph unless there’s some weird regional pricing going on. It’s $13.99 USD for a month of Runescape membership vs $14.99 USD for a month of WoW membership

The only microtransaction in OSRS is the ability to buy membership with in game gold. As someone who is normally staunchly against all MTX it’s a very reasonable tradeoff

In addition to what the other commenter said, it’s more likely as someone newer and thus engaging in lower level activities to encounter bots since it takes less time to set them up and get going than mid to late game content. I find it rare to encounter an obvious bot as someone doing high level pvm/skilling

I bought Balatro, Neon White, GRIS, Rollerdrome, and Pentiment. They’re all under $15 CAD and I’ve sunk a few hours into Balatro already

Like Genome? Or Guh-nome?

Definitely agree with this. I’ll try to ask this in order to connect with their culture (such as with traditional cooking), but I can see why someone would have their guard up when asked. It’s all about intentions

You are the majority though. Every time stats on free to play products are released it’s revealed that 90% of people spend no money and the vast majority of revenue is from whales that spend absurd amounts