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A group of Old School Runescape players successfully tracked down a famous content creator in the game's PvP mode to kill him and claim the biggest bounty in the history of the game: a staggering 16 billion gold pieces.
Westham, the player who actually landed the final blow, recently uploaded a video covering the plot to kill C Engineer, one of the best-known YouTubers in the Old School Runescape community. C Engineer also uploaded his own video chronicling the death from his perspective, and both are well worth a watch.
There's some essential background here. For the past 600 days or so, C Engineer has been playing Old School Runescape on a Hardcore Iron Man account. Iron Men cannot trade or interact with other players, meaning they have to acquire all of their items and supplies themselves. Hardcore Iron Men start the game with a special icon tied to their one life. If they die, they lose their Hardcore status and become regular Iron Men. Your account isn't deleted or anything, but many players – especially content creators – treat dying on a Hardcore as the end of the road, so this mode dramatically raises the stakes of the game.
To ratchet things up further, C Engineer has exclusively been playing his Hardcore Iron Man in Old School Runescape's PvP worlds. Ordinarily, players can only fight each other in designated Wilderness zones or special arenas, but as the name implies, PvP worlds basically turn the whole game world into one giant Wilderness where you can be attacked anywhere. On top of that, he put a bounty on his own head. Fans of C Engineer's YouTube series would regularly donate gold to his main account in order to drive the bounty higher, upping the ante for videos and drawing in more PvP players.
Walking this razor's edge as a Hardcore Iron Man was the whole point of C Engineer's long-running video series. He even went as far as keeping his online status visible, boldly telling would-be player-killers what world he's in. It was cocky and dangerous by design. "This series could end at any point, and if you are the one to kill my Hardcore Iron Man, you will receive the bounty," C Engineer says in his video intro. And he's always survived – PvP at least; he died to a quest boss just weeks ago but decided to continue the series until a player killed him – but finally met his match as the community-funded bounty topped 16 billion GP.
People have been hunting C Engineer ever since he started his account. What enabled Westham and his group to finally catch him was partly Zulrah, one of the most popular bosses in Old School Runescape. Westham knew that C Engineer's current game world was already visible and that he was farming Zulrah for a specific drop, and while fighting the boss, his location could easily be confirmed through a telescope tied to the boss' arena.
Armed with this information, Westham's crew staked out every possible entrance and escape route for C Engineer's Zulrah trip, killing off competing PKers in the process. A member spotted C Engineer on one of the ships used for travel, used a spell to block him from teleporting, and called in the cavalry. Westham, playing on the account Boogaloo Jr at the time, quickly arrived and ultimately landed the killing blow, securing the 16 billion GP.
The successful team of Westham, Pip, Eriksnn, Skrib, and Pimpact split the bounty between them for 3.2 billion GP apiece, which is more than enough money to buy the single most expensive item in Old School Runescape – almost twice over, even. As you can imagine, the Discord chatter at the end of Westham's video is a real treat.
"Tell him to come [here] right f***ing now! I want the 16 bill!" Westham says.
"No way we just did that," a team member adds.
"We did it!" says another.
Then, perfectly, a surprised friend cuts in: "Wait, what'd I miss?"
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