I work full-time :) it's not about playing often, it's about playing efficiently. An experience rate of 2x is already significantly faster than the proper game, couple that with ScapeRune's clearly superior-to-OSRS old-school style and it's a no-brainer.
I also enjoy playing the game (all of it) and grinding skills like Slayer or Fishing is very afk/relaxing to me when I'm at home in the evening watching a movie, or even awake in the morning before work.
This is not a server for the majority of players, it requires a level of patience and dedication that isn't commonly held by people looking to play a RuneScape server. It's also not a server that caters directly to the community -- don't take that the wrong way, the ScapeRune community is very well treated but the server itself is mainly a personal project by the devs. We are all essentially longtime beta testers. The maturity and professionalism of the developers along with the stability and longevity of the server so far is what keeps me playing.
Additionally, the accuracy and the sheer amount of game mechanics that have been implemented is consistently amazing. I can say without a doubt that this sever is 100% best-in-class. Changing the xp rate might make some people happy for a while, but it would also skew how the game flows currently. A lot of the content in RuneScape of this revision is geared towards low- or mid-level players. 2x is about as fast as you can make it without getting silly.
A second world with a 5x experience rate seems like a good idea, but that doubles hosting costs and widens the gap in content. Remember this isn't a traditional server with mechanics that favor small-to-medium groups of 30-to-50 players like most others. The vast majority of the time you spend playing ScapeRune, you are the only player in your currently loaded map chunk. The entire game world is accessible (and more importantly, useful), so you will run across other players pretty frequently, since even when there are 5 people online, they are all running around the world doing their own thing, just like you.
Were this a server that operated traditionally, as far as game mechanics were concerned, a higher experience rate would make sense. Most servers are focused on grouping the player base into the finite amount of areas that contain functional game mechanics, which usually number less than the amount of fingers I have on both hands. That's not how ScapeRune works -- instead of having a few attractions, the entire game world is alive as it was meant to be. To experience that properly, your experience rate has to be proper as well.
Changing the experience rate would nullify what this server is about. If you cranked up the rate to 20x, nothing would make sense. ScapeRune doesn't have Castle Wars yet, for example, and facilities for group activities are relatively limited. The economy the players have built is already centered around acquiring resources under a rate of 2x. There would be nothing to do after you max out in a day (or even a week, a month, ...) and you would get bored quicker than you would when playing at 2x.
That's just not what this game is for. You play the entire game, as it was meant to be, at an already-generous rate of 2x, or you play another server that works differently. The reason ScapeRune causes so much drama is because it's the first server with a real vision for what it wants to be, and these guys are absolutely uncompromising about that. It took them months of deliberation before clan chat was added. That's a positive thing! That's what I love about ScapeRune.
To the rest of you: the hate and drama only keeps this thread bumped and ensures other new players have a chance to try the server. The SR developers are not going to quit or burn out anytime soon. Launching denial-of-service attacks on the server does not hurt us, it only provokes the developers into directing effort at fixing that vulnerability so it can't be exploited any longer. Denial-of-service guy, whoever you were: thank you. Now that your attacks have been mitigated, I can rest assured others like you will have a much harder time exploiting the same type of vulnerability in the future.
