Yep, current players are just playing for the sake of the game itself. Mostly people play ironman style ingame and then line up trades through discord, there's not much of a community to speak of save for a few dozen of the more dedicated members.
I don't think increasing the XP rate is a silver bullet or cure-all, since these guys also don't advertise at all. Not to mention increasing XP would somewhat devalue what current players have accomplished.
It would certainly help though. Or they could have a second world where spawning items and setting skills is allowed, so people could PvP on a ScapeRune server. That'd be cool.
edit:
haha of course right as i post this, we get a decent amount of people on for the weekend
yeah i'm pretty happy with this, all these guys play at least intermittently