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A tragic, cautionary tale has surfaced in the Old School Runescape community, and it's sure to get a wince out of many gamers, especially MMO fans. A rank-one skilling account said to have 20,000 hours logged on it has seemingly been hacked and subsequently renamed to "SamePwEvrywr," or Same Password Everywhere, just to twist the knife.
This started a few days ago when a player named Diddeboy alerted support staff at developer Jagex. Their account, Diddeboy1, is a level three pure with maxed non-combat skills including Slayer – an uncommon skill for such accounts to train, and a nearly unprecedented one for them to max. The account was maxed back in 2021 after 8,000 hours of Slayer training alone, as this post shows. As of March 12, 2023, it had been "compromised with changed passwords." Diddeboy's plight made it to the OSRS Reddit, but the post was deleted by moderators.
The situation got exponentially worse earlier today when the same hacker appeared to have seized Diddeboy's Twitter account. Now-deleted tweets from Diddeboy's account claimed that their passwords were shared between multiple platforms and lacked two-factor authentication. This can't feasibly be verified, and the whole situation is a mess, but judging from the fact that these tweets were deleted and the account has been inactive since, it's possible Diddeboy has at least regained control of their Twitter.
Unfortunately, the damage has already been done. As NotTheBeeze flagged on Reddit, this account, which still sits at the top of the game's skiller high scores, was recently renamed. Worse still, their high score records indicate that the hacker has leveled the account's combat skills, breaking its skiller mold.
There's no telling what, if anything, may or could be done by Jagex support to remedy the situation. Hopefully the account can be restored or at least reclaimed. It's awful to see years of investment ripped up like this, and it's a brutal reminder to protect all of your online and gaming accounts in every way possible, from security backups to strong, different passwords. The response from the OSRS community, which sees countless claims of hacked accounts every day, has been mixed to say the least, but there is an undercurrent of sympathy.
"The dude was a bit insufferable about 'the purity' of his accomplishment but I wouldn't wish that kind of pain on my worst enemy," says NotTheBeeze.
"He definitely didn't deserve this," writes another user.
"Love him or hate him, you gotta feel bad for this happening," says another.
"Let this be a wake up call to people with awful password security practices," reads a comment on another post about the ordeal.
In much happier news about one of the best MMO games, a player recently completed a 19,000-hour grind to max out four of the toughest characters in the entire MMO genre.
