Old School RuneScape/Guides/Member

What are RuneScape Members?
Members are players who pay $5 (US), or the equivalent thereof in their local currency, once every month. It is also known as P2P which is RuneScape slang for "pay to play". There are several methods for paying that are detailed when players click on the "subscribe account" option on the official RuneScape website. Basically the money will be taken automatically once a month until the player cancels their subscription. Once the subscription has been cancelled, the player can check how many more days their previous payment will give them and they still count as members for that time. Once those days run out, they automatically revert to non-member status.


 * Members have special world servers on which they can use members only features, none of these features exist on free worlds and so members have to log in on members servers if they want to use any of the benefits provided for them.

When do Players Become Members?
Usually when they have reached a medium or high level within the game and want to experience something new. Most of the time players will wait until they have level 60 attack and defense as well as a large amount of cash so they can immediately switch to dragon armor and weapons upon gaining member status. Some players prefer to become members as soon as they log in and they will subscribe their account before they ever start playing, this way they won't have to start all over again when they switch to members.

Skills
Agility, Farming, Fletching, Herblore, Slayer, and Thieving are all skills that exist only for members. Non-members cannot train or use these (even if they were members previously). These skills provide great benefits to players who have them and make the game much more fun to experience. Besides these new skills, being a member also expands upon previous skills. For example: non-members have the crafting skill, but only members can use it to blow glass or craft dragonhide armor. Members can also use the runecrafting skill to make cosmic, chaos, nature, law, and death runes whereas non-members can only make elemental, body, and mind runes.

Wear
Members can access a ton of new items, both skill and quest related. The most prominent among these are the dragon and barrows armor and weapons as well as the powerful abyssal whip. Another very big item members can use are sharks as a combat food because they heal 6 more health than the best non-member fish. Other items are halberds, new amulets, rings, and necklaces, tons of new and fashionable clothes (such as werewolf or Viking styles), new soul and blood runes, and much more.


 * Because of all of these new items, members get many more spaces in their banks than a nonmember has.

Quests
Non-members currently have 18 quests they can complete, members have 80+ quests only for themselves and they can also do all of the non-members quests, leading to a total of 100+ quests members can do. Some of these quests are simply interesting, others, such as the Legends Quest, Recipe for Disaster, or the elf quests are very challenging with great rewards.

Areas
The members area of Runescape is about five times larger than the non-members area. It includes the second half of the kingdom of Asgarnia (Taverley, Burthorpe, and White Wolf Mountain), the entire kingdom of Kandarin (Seer's Village, Catherby, Ardougne, Yanille, and Castle Wars), the Gnome stronghold and village, the Elf lands bordering on Kandarin in the west, the Relekka province of the Fremenniks bordering Kandarin in the north, the Kharidian desert lands bordering the city of Al Kharid in the south, Morytania bordering Misthalin in the east, ogre and troll lands, Ape Atoll, and pirate islands in the eastern seas.

Community
Members can post on the official forums, while non-members may read posts on forums they are unable to respond to them. Members can also vote in polls, which are held about once a month to give feedback to Jagex, new updates are made taking information from these polls into account. Weekly game updates will be mostly directed at members, non-members updates are extremely rare. Customer support is also more effective for members.