A lot of things you have to get past, after that, its fun. heres some tips and my opinion
-terrible graphics
-even worse sound
-community sucks
-+5$ to make it worth the time
-hackers, scammers, spammers etc,
to like this game, first of all, you have to come up with solutions to these bad parts above. like turn off the sound effects and music ( they really do suck) and make a playlist or something. which mmorpg doesnt have hackers scammers and spammers? just ignore the few spammers, be careful during trades, and as for hackers, you rarely see them in rs, unlike maplestory or something. rs does perm ban every hacker they see tho, which is good.
Forget about the community, make a short list of friends, and spend the time with them. The majority of the people are little idiot kids, but hey, theres still some cool people around. As for the graphics, they suck. but all the other free/cheap mmorpgs that do have much better graphics, do they have nearly as much content as runescape?
free players dont get jack, but its only 5$ a month. if its still too much, than dont pay it! wait a couple of months, check out the new updates, see if you like it, and than decide if you want to see them. meanwhile, do something else.
take other mmorpgs out there for example and comepare them. silk road, ragnarok, maplestory, flyff, guild wars, and wow. ( how can you comepare runescape to wow anyways?) ragnarok is going downhill because of wow, maplestory has got to be the worst IMO because all you do is kill stuff, even the quests, which forces to kill stuff, guild wars is the best IMO, but its 30$ + more $ for updates,( enough $ to play runescape member for 2 years ) flyff and silk road has much better graphics but gets very boring after a while ( much like maplestory..agh ).
hope this review/ runescape survival guide proves to be useful.