MMO devs give their blessing to an absurd exploit for a 16-year-old minigame, dedicate two themed worlds in its honor

In October, Old School RuneScape players discovered a game-breaking exploit for a 16-year-old minigame. Developer Jagex was surprisingly cool with the whole thing - in fact, now the studio has dedicated two themed worlds in the exploit's honor.

You can read more about how OSRS fans broke the game to farm XP and get addicted to fruit at that link, but in short, there's an ancient stealth minigame in the MMO where you have to sneak past guards to steal some juicy fruits called sq'irks. Players found that, by rushing the minigame in sufficient numbers, the guard AI would break, protecting most of those participating from being discovered and failing the minigame. This proved to be a pretty lucrative way to farm Thieving XP, and the whole community soon became obsessed with, uh, "sq'irkin'."

One might assume the devs would have an issue with this kind of exploit, but it was just the opposite. "Absolutely no issue with Sq'irkin', keep it going! We're talking about making it a themed world too," the game's associate design director wrote on Reddit last week.

Themed worlds are servers that Jagex has given special names to in order to help like-minded players who want to engage in certain types of activities find one another. Today, the studio made good on that earlier hint - now, you can find not just one, but two dedicated sq'irk exploit servers in the world list. World 523 is called "Sq'irkin'," and 524 is called "Sq'irkin' too." The Sq'irk fiends out there finally have a place to call their own.

There's a reason OSRS remains a fixture on our list of the best MMORPGs.