A lot of tedium is added into these games to force the player into spending real money for skips & access to content. It is a valid way to incentivize customers into paying for given service, but also means there are many time wasting repetitive tasks that can ruin the experience if one does not grasp the concept of "when the game starts getting tedions, you are supposed to pay"

> is copying the game outright legal

no it is not. a lot of runescape servers have recently been receiving UDRP disputes (to get domain + contact info) and subsequent legal communications from jagex