This year the summer was extremely hot in the northern hemisphere. So much so, that it actually became the hottest summer to date. For Old School RuneScape players, the summer in 2018 was hot on both worlds: Earth and Gielinor.
July 12th, 2018 is immortalized in the dusty archives of OSRS history. A day that began like every other suddenly became one filled with shock, astonishment, and bans. That day a new update for the thieving skill went live. Everything was proceeding as usual, Jagex released an update log, players were getting on with their activities, whether it was skilling, PvMing or PvPing. Now, the latter here played the most important role.
After the update went live, nobody noticed anything different for some time, some people didn’t notice anything at all and only read about it on OSRS page or heard from friends later. Everything happened so suddenly many players were left wondering why they can’t log into the game. PvPers were the first ones to catch on. A popular streamer Purpp was streaming his PKing adventures live when suddenly he looted his victim’s corpse to find a whopping 2147M gold on it!
Players quickly caught on and realized this was a bug. Everyone acted according to their conscience: some players went straight to Jagex to report the issue, some went on a hunt for more gold and others used this opportunity to get themselves virtually free bonds. Of course, all who abuse a bug eventually get banned and this case was no exception. A better way to become an OSRS billionaire is to simply buy OSRS gold, rather than abuse a bug.
As we’ve mentioned earlier, the bug was introduced with an update that included changes to thieving. It was supposed to be that when robbing NPCs, players get coin pouches instead of actual coins and they had to open them to get the coins. It worked perfectly during testing, hence the reason the bug was missed. Only these pouches were tested, but because of a mistake in the code, this new mechanic was triggered by other items. Although, Jagex themselves avoided to state what it was exactly, from all the information there is on the topic it can be assumed that it affected stackable items, such as runes and arrows. This particular update was targeting bots and gold farmers, however, by accident it became a test both for players and Jagex themselves.
Jagex staff really deserves praise here, since they reacted quickly and the game was shut down after only 19 minutes have passed and it went back online on the same day. Shutting the game down wasn’t a test in itself, however fixing the situation was. Jagex resolved the issue by implementing the first-ever roll back and they themselves stated that this could cause issues since they’ve never done it before and didn’t have tools specifically for a rollback. Some accounts had to be cleaned manually of this dirty gold and could not log in for a bit longer, while others felt the full force of the ban hammer for abusing a bug. In addition to a ban, players who bought membership via bonds lost that membership time.
July 12th, 2018 became memorable not only for the bug but also for the way Jagex fixed the issue. Although this was the first time a rollback was implemented, it wasn’t the last. At the beginning of the next year, a similar economy crashing type of bug occurred. This time it wasn’t related to OSRS gold directly. It was an ever spawning Twisted Bow, the best-ranged weapon in the game, which could be looted by anyone. This time Jagex had more confidence: they quickly initiated the rollback and even though players could not login for a while, the bug was fixed and had no impact on the community, except for producing some funny moments and memes.
