This does impact the economy as some skills are buyable. Building is 100% money sink as product are ruined while abilities such as herblore suffers due to instant-buy substance merchandise. Hence creating large gp/xp reduction. Herblore is an illustration; that RS gold applies to fletching/crafting/buyable abilities as well. The max cape/completionist is a big issue in RS3 for this reason. It is literally the best cape in Runescape, minus RS3's version of the Infernal Cape. To get into really high level PVM maxing is regarded as a must with specific perks enabled or you are just going to be out DPSed by someone else and not be as fractionally powerful.

Jagex dealt with this matter and wanted to create the cape cosmetic only or attempt to make the capes only trigger certain types of high tier cape slot items but their was a massive backlash of individuals who awakened months obtaining these capes. I wouldnt say that the Max cape or the perk system are bad per-say, in games, it only requires some reworking. It creates sense having the max capes be the capes in Runescape, but becoming 99 are more of a time sink afterward a skill obstacle.

I would like a comp cape at OSRS for some thing for me to work toward but I would not want it to have any special perks beyond the regular max cape stuff. No one uses max or comp anymore. The kiln capes now outclassed it. They did nerf the stats about the comp and max capes, and now with the release of wars escape, there's absolutely no need for being max for the maximum guild. A lot of perks (of comp, not skill cape perks) also got shifted to perm fans that you unlock as you go, which means you don't require comp anymore because of that.

Skillcapes are problematic for quite a very long time. In RWT we saw a rise Following their introduction in 2006 and botting in 2007. Correlation doesn't equal causation. Having lived it, I would be very inclined to believe that the interval between when capes were released and the spike in RWT and bot action you mentioned was also one in which Runescape saw a good quantity of growth.

Beyond this, what you are proposing is that the act of getting individuals to play Runescape more is going to worsen the botting and RWT problems. If that's accurate, it is only the cost of doing business because they want people enjoying more. I recall the shift in attitude the release of skillcapes. It actually was a time before skillcapes. Then after their release everyone seemed to abruptly care.

Now its much. The playerbase is obsessed with efficiency. I believe its hurting Runescape. There's a lot of dead content ingame, simply as it is not thought to be efficient. Same thing for new content, which has to be both efficient or better. The efficiency attitude the skillcapes caused increased the requirement for cheating and RWT. The OSRS buy gold perks are also a big part of the issue, like IVIorphinz stated, however, it all began with the introduction of skillcapes in my opinion.