Brand new accounts get a short term (one week I think?) trial of members that starts them out in Burthorpe, making it part tutorial, part full-game-demo/membership-lure. I believe the intent is to try to get people not to do the F2P first route, as I hear from a lot of F2Pers that often they think F2P is boring, so why pay for P2P, thinking it would be more of the same, when in fact P2P is the far more interesting side of the game: It has more in-depth quests and cool minigames and less tedious ways to train, plus the people are much less annoying. I'll be honest, F2Pers is the main reason I went P2P ages ago.
Also, I'm pretty sure you're only mute if you say you're under 13 when you start your account, but I'm not sure. I'm about to brave the lag and try out a new account to see it all for myself, actually. I'm hoping low settings, a quiet world, and OpenGL mode will make it tolerable.
Also, Tim, I don't mean to criticize every statement of yours, but I disagree entirely about the maze-like feeling of Burthorpe. It's very different, yes; you'll just have to look at the map and figure where things are like you had to do when you were brand new to the game though. That doesn't make it mazelike, and in fact, from studying the map it looks more like it's laid out in a nice circular path, and it covers all the skills. That's a big improvement over Tutorial Island, which got a lot of complaints about covering only the most basic of skills.
Furthermore, about voice acting in MMO's: Yes, it's old-hat ... in downloadable MMO's. Browser-based ones? We have one of the oldest browser-based games that aren't static images with clickable linky commands. Runescape is pushing the limits of the capabilites of browser-based games (that aren't browser-displayed executables [Earth Eternal] or streaming client based data [like with Kalydo, which allows client-based games to stream data as needed instead of forcing an install, see:
http://www.kalydo.com/5-reasons-to-choose-kalydo/] which is a different thing, but is commonly lumped together -- you don't need to download a client to run Runescape in your browser like a lot of other so-called browser-based games are.) Those games have had big voice-acting media files for a long time because it's easy to pull that data from your computer and play it; far harder to pull that data through the used-to-be-much-slower internet and play it without lag or compression problems.
