An MMO Shawshank Redemption slipped under the radar last month as one dedicated Old School RuneScape player finally escaped a cell he'd constructed for himself after roughly 1,200 hours of dragon slaying. In the end, it all came down to the power of friendship.
YouTuber Josh Isn't Gaming – a blatant lie, as he is clearly gaming – has spent over a year playing an Old School RuneScape account with self-imposed restrictions that warp the game. Using the community's popular "Chunk" ruleset, which divides the game world into randomly unlocked squares that players cannot leave until they complete every goal within each unlocked chunk, Josh additionally leashed his account to the region of Yanille, forcing himself to painstakingly master every facet of the area before adventuring further.
Chunk gamers are no stranger to exhausting grinds, but Josh stepped into a doozy many months ago. One section of Yanille – a newly unlocked chunk – is home to two black dragons that have a very low chance of dropping a rare item: the Draconic Visage, used to craft a Dragonfire Shield. By his own rules, Josh could not move past this area until he bagged a 1-in-10,000 Visage drop (according to the OSRS Wiki), and with his limited account posing little threat to the high-level dragons, getting it would be a grind and a half.
For months, Josh sought ways to speed up his dragon slaying. Melee combat wasn't a realistic option since he lacked dragon breath protection, so he needed a way to kill the black dragons from a distance. He settled on shooting 50,000 hard-won arrows at them, and when that didn't work, he went back to the drawing board.
One breakthrough provided a more efficient source of arrows, but 2,000 dragon kills into a video harrowingly titled "My Runescape Account has been Locked Here for 1200 Hours," Josh started to look outside the box. What if, he seemed to wonder, I could get somebody to kill the dragons for me?
You might argue that this cheapens the grind, but that's missing the ingenuity on display here, and besides, the game itself doesn't see it that way. Josh's account is an Ironman, meaning it can't trade with other people or loot enemies that other players have damaged, so ordinarily he wouldn't be able to receive any help in combat. But as OSRS creators so often prove, there's a workaround to almost everything.
By cleverly exploiting the game's rules for damage assignment, specifically by having another player apply a damage-over-time venom effect with a weak attack that would allow the dragons to heal to full HP before that venom kicks in, Josh was able to outsource his dragon kills. Instead of fully killing the resilient mobs by hand, he could swoop in and deal the final blow while still receiving full credit, all while he and his teammates hopped around different worlds to maximize their dragons per hour (DPH, we in the business call it).
This method sped up the grind considerably, and it only got faster as Josh and his A-team of Discord assistants fine-tuned the method, setting up worlds of "cooked" dragons ready to be harvested. The crew spent so much time staring at these two dragons – some of them in it for the 400 million gold bounty on the dragon that drops the Visage – that they started to write their own lore.
The two black dragons were dubbed Greg and Janice, a divorced couple who split amicably and still live together "for the tax benefits." Janice "wears the pants in this dungeon," it seems. Trust me, reader; these are actually among the sanest OSRS players I've seen, and I've seen a lot.
With dragon kills now flooding in, Josh was eventually able to secure his Visage after enduring the "endless struggle, the mental and emotional weight of this challenge," as he puts it, for 7,802 kills. Joined by commiserating content creators, excited dragon hunters, and an impressively supportive partner, he says "I literally feel like I just got my life back" as the grind finally comes to an end.
"That kind of community-driven discovery is what RuneScape really is all about," he concludes. As players continue to poke holes in a timeless MMO, I have to agree.
