Agree with Yuan; the area had clear benefits that had risks attached to getting those benefits. Old School Runescape still has this, and it works. I recently went to the wilderness agility course and got some significant XP gains but was player killed about 40 minutes in.
At this point, Runescape 3 is so broken that these new changes aren't anything. The changes they made over a decade ago dismantled and alienated their players. Since then, they've continued down that path with no real effort to fix anything since Old School.
You can abuse bonds for gp. I understand that it was a tactic to stop real-world trading, but compared to their absolute hard no stance. It's allowing players to pay to win.
The gambling game in RS3, allows you to buy all your XP from lamps or get stored bonus XP or many other perks. You can buy your way to 99 with lamps. That's so far removed from what they wanted at the start.
EOC changed combat significantly and alienated players. You learn and grow with a style, and they change it, and now you have this weird state of play where some players are full EOC, some play old style, or you have a mix.
The fact that I am levelled up 80 in dungeoneering and divination, 63 in invention and 60 in archaeology should tell that the game is broken. I couldn't tell you anything much about dungeoneering. Im 63 in invention for some reason. I know very little about it. Divination, I think I spammed the levels up somewhere with bonus XP. Archaeology I levelled when it came out, but again, I can't tell you anything about that skill.
The sad part is, I probably have around 250k bonus experience in most skills. I went to the gambling thing to test out my theory. I went and spent money on the game, and when I realised how broken the game was, I stopped playing. There's no fun in a game that can be cheesed like that.
I say that the wilderness changes mean nothing. Opt PVP is fine, but the game is already broken at it's core.