EoC was a very half-baked attempt to mimic numerous other MMOs out there with combat skill systems and skill cooldowns. It failed spectacularly and nearly the entire playerbase vanished overnight. Went from around 250k people playing to barely 20-25k.
The main problem was that no one asked for it or even wanted it. They just threw that update at us out of nowhere and didn’t even pretend to optimize it for pre-existing monsters/bosses. So because of those new skills, most bosses were trivial encounters that could be soloed nearly indefinitely due to how broken many of those skills were. At the same time almost every high-end gear item was made mostly useless while any weapon valued for it’s special was actually made useless due to them removing special attacks altogether.
Now some of this is fixed these days, but the entire reputation of RS3 was shattered and will never be recovered. After their whole business nearly tanked they put out the OSRS version which is as the game was from roughly 2007 as it was just a backup of the game from then. They are now two entirely different games with independent dev teams and different quests, updates, and mechanics.
