I have personally always been a little bit of a coward when it comes to this. When I first started playing it was several years back in college and RuneScape gold was with a group of friends so of course people understood I played. After a few years however it was just me and a remaining"hardcore" group of friends who kept playing and eventually even they stopped playing and that I carried on alone without telling anyone largely, I am not ashamed to confess it, for fear of ridicule. This was also roughly around the time we began making friends with girls and I am confident that affected a number of my friends to stop. It was about then really I found Sal's and joined to be able to preserve some type of social aspect however so it was not all bad.

After stopping RS an old flatmate of mine actually got me in to WoW which I've played on and off for a couple of years now. Like my secret RS days it is not something I've ever told my friends. They are not terrible people (despite how I am making them seems ) and wouldn't ostracise me or anything but there will definitely be a great deal of jokes made.

I concur with your remarks about it'simply being a different video game' however we can't overlook that in real life there is always likely to be a stigma attached to multiplayer online gaming particularly RPGs and people of the fantasy genre than say CoD or Battlefield.

That I had a few friends who made me feel like that. But they were far from'perfect' themselves. I finally have a girlfriend that I love and live together and she knows I perform, she even performs her f2p account once in a while. I discovered that in the later teenage years it was taboo to allow folks know you played (few children would play in my programming classes and they got flamed A LOT from the other students and even the teacher.) But now it seems somewhat more acceptable for some reason, I am not sure whether it has to do with my getting old or the maturity of the others. For starters it was the best weapon in the game far until 2008 or so, and even before EoC it was one of the best. Before it is special attack was nerfed it had one of the best special strikes in the game as well (particular attack was you hit your max or you hit zero). I dominated everybody my level in Castle Wars:P. Crystal Bow-I used to like this one a lot, probably because it's strong and uses no ammo (it had been the initial ranged weapon to use no ammo for a very long time). Kharil's Crossbow-I had these back in the afternoon and Old School RS Gold was a significant improvement over a magic shortbow. Again this was fun to use in Castle Wars, sadly the ammo was overly pricey and unrecoverable.