The reason why I lost interest in RuneScape is because the game was going from a sort of of socialist economy, where you work and get paid for your work, into a more capitalist one where you spend a bunch of up-front money to make passive income. Eventually the amount of passive income you get just dwarfs playing the actual game and it's like "why bother?" All you do is log in, collect your Kingdom, then collect your Ships, Load up your machines, harvest your animals, do your daily and that's it. No gameplay. The most fun I had playing the game was actually earning progress in the game rather than having it handed to me, not roleplaying as a fucking landlord. It's kind of insidious how the game slowly turned into a lord simulator. I'm thinking of all the features which basically boil down to "You're the boss, make these people do work for you and you'll get free money/xp while you're away." How long until the MC becomes a slave owner?
Sometimes, I just think of the alternate universe where Runescape just kept with Andrew Gower's original vision of the game, in which nearly everything is craftable, and the economy is decided entirely through small trades and the players...
One development that I couldn't stand was when they started putting resources on drop tables. It was designed to stop people from botting common resources by flooding the market through PVM, but they didn't stop there. It wasn't long before literally every resources was better obtained through combat than actually creating them. Unlike with botted resources, people still needed to get XP so these items' value plummeted into the dirt.