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Old School RuneScape is no stranger to bizarre, self-imposed player challenges or unusual but beneficial bugs, yet the latest intersection of these two has sparked an ugly discussion in the MMO's community, and it all started with a YouTuber whose account was reset by developer Jagex shortly after he finished the kind of grind that I wouldn't wish on people doomed to at least the shallower circles of Hell.
On May 5, OSRS YouTuber Rendi, known for years for finding strange ways to complete content and challenges at perilously low combat levels, celebrated reaching level 99 Slayer on his level 3 skiller account. Slayer is, by design, a skill where you fight monsters and thus train your combat skills, so leveling it, let alone maxing it, on a combat-free level 3 account is arduous and requires unorthodox methods.
Rendi hinted, but had notably not yet fully explained, that he used loopholes in the game's Slayer Partner system, which lets multiple people complete shared Slayer tasks simultaneously, in combination with multi-logging on "many accounts" in order to boost his account's Slayer experience rates to an impressive level – a purported "average" of 45,000 XP per hour.
Apparently, Rendi wasn't the only person involved in this Slayer Partner grind, nor was he the only one to lose an ankle when developer Jagex swung the hammer. On May 6, after three months of grinding and less than one day of glory, Rendi shared that his account had been rolled back to just 78 Slayer – a massive chunk of XP lost due to the way level thresholds scale in OSRS (92 is famously halfway to 99).
What really put this story on my desk was a Twitter response to Rendi from associate OSRS community director Mod Ayiza. Explaining the account rollback, Ayiza says, "During routine checks at the start of this week a number of accounts were flagged for having obtained abnormal amounts of XP. It was investigated further, and today the bug was fixed to prevent it being possible again. Any accounts found to have abused this had their XP removed - not just you."
Ayiza attributed the account action to "decisions on game health," reiterating bug abuse in this method. Pressed on how this allegedly abusive method differs from standard level 3 training approaches which are only moderately slower, Ayiza says, "I think it's mostly down to how the level 3 account interacts with the content, and in this case, the team deemed it as bug abuse, but this isn't the place for me to go into further details on it to be honest."
I was also struck by the OSRS community's reaction to this whole thing. It's far from rare for fans of YouTuber or Twitch content creators to rush to their defense online, nor is the 2007scape subreddit known as an unbreakable bastion of seriousness, but the turnout here really is approaching the level of the riots that this game spawns every so often (frequently over membership price hikes).
The brutal timing of Jagex's harsh response, coupled with the visibility provided by Rendi's posts about it, stoked roughly a zillion critical posts and replies online. It's essentially become an excuse to dig up old grievances about the game, with many players wondering why this warranted such a response when other, more severe and game-impacting issues have not been addressed in the same way.
This is another evergreen problem with living games like MMOs – different priorities between devs and players, and differing understandings of how problems get resolved with what resources – but I can't resist nodding along with some of the complaints. One less level 3 account with 99 Slayer running around has not, you will find, really affected anyone else's experience.
"So with Jagex’s recent stance on unintended bugs being used for skilling methods that clearly weren’t designed, I think it’s great we’re finally taking integrity seriously," argues one player, suggesting many years-old training methods must also warrant account action and rule changes.
"It's funny that they draw the line here but there are so many loophole mechanics in this game that it's impossible to determine whether something is intended or not," reckons a top reply to the main subreddit post about this.
To wit, another player writes, "I have to confess, [I've] been abusing a bug for years upon years," again referring to a staple, Jagex-approved way of exploiting game mechanics – in this case, by way of "prayer flicking" to negate an intended resource loss.
"Your meme is now under review for a routine check," replies one joking player.
Like me after losing a Slay the Spire 2 run to a misclick, this has spiraled a fair bit. But then the Jagex hammer swung again. Today, Ayiza posted a lengthy write-up on the OSRS subreddit explaining the bug and Jagex's response.
"Partner Slayer has a check that requires the player to have killed at least some of the assigned creatures to get the rewards from the task," he explains. "In this instance, this was not working effectively for small tasks, more specifically boss tasks. This allowed players to get rewards without ever interacting with or slaying the creature. Slayer should entail at least some slaying."
The problem is that the bug Jagex was able to reproduce would give Slayer Partners credit for low-quantity Slayer tasks. If you selected a task to kill a boss just three times, you could do nothing but still net a 5,000 XP payout because the 20% contribution rule from Partner Slayer would round to 0.6, "effectively granting them Slayer XP for watching their partner kill bosses and doing no actual Slayer or interaction whatsoever on their own."
Ayiza says "we noticed a Level-3 character had broken into the top 10 for ‘Daily Slayer XP Gains’ across all account types," with the same character not only "averaging around 55,000 XP/hr" but even "breaking the 90,000 XP/hr mark, which is drastically higher than what we’ve seen in the past for limited builds like this, and at times even competing with main player rates." In total, 12 accounts were flagged.
"From there we spotted that the majority of the gains being made were in increments of 5,000 XP at a time, so we began exploring the Boss Task completion bonus as the likely culprit to investigate for reproduction steps," he adds.
After isolating players who'd received XP this way multiple times, a targeted rollback was deployed. However, Ayiza admits that "our approach to actioning against bug-abuse has, as you’ve rightly pointed out, been inconsistent."
With this in mind, the affected accounts will have a "portion" of their lost XP restored "based on expected rates that similar account builds would get if they were interacting with the content based on established metas."
In other words, Rendi et al will get the XP they would have earned without help from this bug, which is perhaps the best resolution anyone could expect. The whole thing is arguably not blameless, but it does feel like it got out of hand due to a lack of information. And we are ultimately talking about 12 people on a corner-case grind in a 500-year-old MMO. But I do love a good rabbit hole.
Jagex concludes: "Looking forward, we want to provide better clarity on what behaviour might result in action being taken against your account, and how we make it clearer to you what we consider bug abuse vs emergent gameplay, or fun ways to push the boundaries of the game."
