Back when I was 12 years old, this was basically my first internet experience and my first experience in talking to people who did not live in this area of Texas. That was just about the best thing that could happen to me as a kid.
Of course, they kept doing X, X, X, X, X, X, and X updates, where the game started feeling less addictive as I played it even though I was finding reasons to not hate it. As odd as it sounds, the largest game-breaker for me was the Grand Exchange. It was only neat for so long before you realized that advancing any skill started requiring you to fork more and more cash while most skills themselves cost more gold to train than they would provide. Raw materials are flat out more valuable than the products created from them. Would you like cut an uncut onyx with your high level in crafting? The cut onyx now costs 400,000 gold less, and a further crafted item could range from -100k to -1.5 Million. Perfect economic logic. I won't even go into what massive merching clans do, no one has to be smart with their money anymore, it's similar to a Wall Street for Pre-Kindergarteners.
All people care about is having the stats in the shortest time possible. I was level 131 with 28 cooking, 26 slaying, etc and I was never pressed to spend the day or two it would take to advance them by a couple dozen levels. The only real reasons to level a skill aside from an achievement cape was to either do a quest or play an activity that was actually fun.
I could bitch and moan all day about RuneScape. I'm done with it, though. I started laying less and less until hitting a wall sometime in early 2011, there were just too many memories and life lessons(>_>) gained from that game's weird to painfully ordinary player base for me to give up on it that easily.