I've never played Runescape so my answer is I play literally any other games.

My comment is unhelpful but I'm posting it anyway.

I quit RuneScape in 2011ish after squeal of fortune introduced legacy loot. I’m sorry, but for a game that was all about 100% completion, making loot legacy and unobtainable if you didn’t gamble for it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Honestly it sounds like you might like some of the aspects of EVE Online

I play old school maplestory on maplelegends. They have strict "no real world trade" rules and no pay to win. It really is just the game how it should be played, which really highlights all the flaws in the game (there are many)

Obviously the main draw is nostalgia, so if it's something you've never played it won't have much value, but the community is great and it's an mmo with lots to do and endgame content to aspire to

Final Fantasy XIV may lack the point and click tick based combat and semi AFK gameplay but it's a solid MMORPG.

Try Wakfu. There are a lot of chill trades to grind casually and the economy is completely player driven. There are no NPCs to buy or sell your loot to.

The PvE gameplay loop is really fun. The game has an adjustable level system that encourages players to replay lower level dungeons. Battles are turn based and have a surprising amount of strategy.

The only real problem with the game is that the devs seem to not care about player growth at all. They do zero marketing and sometimes the registration system is broken and won’t get fixed for awhile. It’s like the opposite problem to RuneScape.

Check out walkscape beta

I'm not sure what you mean by "low effort"? OSRS is an incredibly good game and keeps getting new content all the time. I'm happy to pay 15$ a month since we get a free update every wednesday. Sometimes it's just some hotfix , other times it's a whole new boss or continent. We had an new part of the map just last week.

Yes there is bot, but I never felt like it impacted my gameplay other than lowering the price of some items. The team is also doing a lot to ban them, it's getting much better.

The community is booming. If you look around on YouTube, there's a lot of content creators doing awesome thing on OSRS: custom game mode, weird twist on existing challenges, documentary, etc.

Honestly, I think we are currently in the golden age of Old school RuneScape, and if you feel like the game is bad or low effort, it might not be for you, which is fine, but the game itself is not the issue.

I hope you find some other game to give you what you had with RuneScape back in the days !

This is going to be a weird suggestion but, if you like the pvm aspect of killing bosses to get powerful loot and take on more difficult challenges, you should play Remnant 2.

It's a souls like shooter about exploring a few different worlds searching for new gear so you can make better builds, loot is not randomized so there is a clear BiS for your build.

If you're not excited about Brighter shores then I really don't know, for some reason no one else has ever tried to make the same type of game (aside from Genfanad and Titanreach, both of which have shut down quickly after release)

You could check out Project: Gorgon, it's something of a mix between Runescape's multitude of slow-to-level, interconnected skills on one character and a more typical MMO with distinct classes, buildcrafting and group content. It has a free demo on Steam. All of that said it's only vaguely similar, and I wouldn't mention it if there was anything closer to OSRS.

Corporate greed has killed all of my favorite mmos, and every new mmo that comes out is further down the spiral.

So I decided to make my own damn game, a mashup of my top 5 favorite defunct mmos. Base gameplay/progression/dynamic events from Tabula Rasa, Star Wars Galaxies crafting/building, Firefall jumping/gliding/thumping, the mechs from Exteel, and the territory control map from Planetside 1.

It's 100% a shameless asset flip, and currently jank af, but pretty fun at the moment.

I don't know about nowadays, but back in 2007 when I got bored with Runescape I switched to Guild Wars. Great MMO. Kind of dead playerwise now, but the servers are still up and it is soloable.