I loved the OG game for the adventure, and I never really liked the combat, or any sort of combat endgame. That the main branch (RS3) turned into boss-scape really put me off, and OSRS has essentially become that too, which I find awful. I don't know if I would outright declare anything in OSRS ridiculous, but things seemed to pile up in such a way that the final result is...slightly ridiculous. My favorite things to do ingame became increasingly worthless, so eventually I stopped playing.
I did really like Zeah though - it's a great big new area to explore, and it was a cool concept. I really liked the Arceuus spellbook - and I actually trained to 99 prayer off of it (lol). But I don't think my love of adventure is enough to overcome the idea that the game is just
not made for me. It's for players who want a bossing endgame, or for bots. It's not really for people going for skilling or minigames endgame like I do.
About Vinesweeper - this one is interesting. I was the spark that started the community event for vinesweeper, the first one a few weeks back, and then another big one held today that I organized through my 99 farming party. Seeing the community come together to play the minigame was super fun, and is what I always loved most in this game - people playing minigames together
. But I did notice the point about how Vinesweeper changes the character of farming. In OG game I got 99 farming primarily via pineapple trees; here in 2009scape, I did it primarily via allotments (watermelons+strawberries) and vinesweeper. Vinesweeper alone is viable to go from 1-99 farming - at level 90 you get around 140k points per hour solo (and points per hour scales linearly with level), which means the minigame can be used to dodge the skill entirely. I see this as a flaw in the minigame's rewards - but, of course, not in the minigame itself. I like that we have Vinesweeper. If I had balanced it myself, I would have probably just cut the XP trade-in option, or made it something like 7:1 points:xp (instead of 1:1). But I think this is part of the general pattern of how the Jagex games went - they wanted to move people away from OG-style skilling (for whatever reason, I'm not going to talk about that in this post), so they provided increasingly powerful substitutes. In that sense, both Vinesweeper and Mahogany homes are 'ridiculous' - especially when put together with all the other skill character changes (Wintertodt, Arceuus reanimation, etc). But I do not think there is any flaw in concept in OSRS - just flaws in rewards/balancing. Which is just as deep (or deeper), but I have always loved the concepts that these games come up with. Though, I haven't actually played the game in about 3 years, though I have kept up with the news somewhat, but maybe there are things I missed.
But anyways I think I'll end this post here: the most ridiculous thing OSRS has become is the sheer level of inflation of boss rewards relative to other aspects of the game. As a marker/index of this, check out how much a fighter torso costs to purchase these days (50m+ I think?), compared to around 8m back in 2017-2018. How the hell is a torso worth 50m? But it is! Something ridiculous is brewing...