Make Your Own "Runescape Private Server"

Finally, you have finished the development of your very own RuneScape private server! Congratulations! After that festive launch of your unique server it is just a matter of waiting for all those visitors to start playing your RSPS, right? After a week of waiting and boredom you’ve decided to take a closer look at your server and its statstics. The result? There’s not even a handful of visitors on your RuneScape server. Your question follows; where are the players and why are they not playing the server? The server is so good, why isn’t the server stuffed with players yet?

In this article we’ll be answering the questions in the above case.

Players do not come naturally

You must know that RSPS players do not come naturally. Having the newest RS items, coolest PK’ing RSPS or the world’s most beautiful website does not guarantee players on you RuneScape private server. You’ll need to spend time, effort and eventually money (depending on your goal) into your promotion campaign. This is not a matter of hours, but weeks or months.

In short: you’ll need perseverance!

A website is a must-have!

Designing a properly looking and structured website is a must-have for each RuneScape private server. Your website must meet the following requirements:

• KISS, also known as the ‘Keep it simple, stupid’-principle. Keep the layout clean, easy on the eye and cosistent.
• Don’t add any annoying animations, effects or sounds.
• Don’t overload your visitor with too much text.
• Pictures are worth a thousands words. Use screenshots to show-off your server. Don’t forget to resize and compress screenshots to assure that the images load fast on all internet speeds!
• A short promotion video is welcome.
• A notable ‘call-to-action’ button is a must. Buttons like “Play now!”, “Play for free” and “Register a free account” work very well.

If you’re somewhat more into website development, you really should look into landing pages for your RSPS. A landing page is a single web page that only new first-time visitors will see. This has been one of the keys to success for the currect major servers. Yours should be next.

Free advertising for your Runescape server

Forget paid advertising, you should first focus on free advertising! Even when you have a large budget to spend. Paid advertising does not work well for brand new or almost empty RuneScape private servers. Those who click on expensive paid advertisement banners expect a succesful server, not a brand new RS private server.

Submit your RSPS to toplists

You should submit your RSPS to at least three different RS toplists. It might sound a little arrogant, but submitting your RSPS to our toplist is the best start. RuneLocus was the very first toplist for RSPS, and is still the main toplist for RuneScape private servers.

Many of the other toplists have a so-called “nofollow” attribute enabled, but RuneLocus does not. This means Google’s crawlers will even catch up your website within hours and list it because they consider RuneLocus as a high quality referer.

You’ll have a lot of large competitors with massive amount of votes, but don’t let them scare you off. Rank 1 comes later, you’ll first need to kick off. There’s many people looking for smaller and even new servers. They’ll try out servers on other pages of the toplist, usually to page two to ten. So make sure you and your friends vote every 12 hours to assure you’ll take a position on one of those secondary pages.

Some toplists support the use of banners. Banners should be clean and need to radiate status and professionality. Banners made in pain are a no-go, and don’t use fonts that are not readable. Banners work best when you add a visual button inside it with text like “Play now for free”.

Create an advertisement thread on forums

There’s plenty of forums to create an advertisement thread at, take our as example. Create a thread (just one, don’t spam!) and add the most attractive information to it. A short introduction about your server, a bunch of screenshots and a screenshot. Very important is to use hyperlinks. Make sure all links to your website are clickable, and words like “play” are also clickable when you’re saying “Come and play for free”.