GamesMMOOld School RuneScape"People could’ve made billions": MMO legend returns from 2-year hiatus to share a game-breaking Old School RuneScape bug so dangerous even a former dev is shockedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesMMOOld School RuneScape"People could’ve made billions": MMO legend returns from 2-year hiatus to share a game-breaking Old School RuneScape bug so dangerous even a former dev is shockedWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Jagex)
Many MMO fans will remember theFalador Massacrethat struck RuneScape in June 2006. A bug with player housing gave some users the ability to attack other players in non-PvP zones, including the go-to market section of the city of Falador where players would go to sell expensive items. Cue the rampant looting. Old School RuneScape, a 2007-inspired branch of the MMO operated in parallel to mainline RuneScape, recently dodged another PvP bug with ties to player-owned housing – and while it was no massacre, it could have been a disaster.
Old School RuneScape sleuth Gudi, who hadn’t been sincea December 2021 videoabout a different PvP strategy, recently released a lengthy deep-dive on the discovery, testing, and long-delayed patching of this game-breaking bug. I’m going to distill it down as best I can,but the whole thing is worth the watch.
I found a game-breaking bug in Runescape - YouTubeWatch On
I found a game-breaking bug in Runescape - YouTube
I found a game-breaking bug in Runescape - YouTube
The short version is this: a bug with delayed damage, which was seemingly months old even at the time of discovery, could cause players to die to another player in a safe area, respawn in an unsafe area, and then take damage from an attack that was registered before their death. If this delayed damage was enough to kill you again, your second death would be treated as a PvP kill. And as Gudi observed, the ramifications of this areenormous.
You can have up to 99 base HP in OSRS and you respawn with full health, so this delayed 25 damage wouldn’t be enough to kill most players a second time. However, multiple players could theoretically stack Ancient Godsword attacks at once in a multi-combat zone to trigger the delayed damage multiple times and kill even max-HP players. This brings us to player housing, which became entangled in PvP exploits once again.
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(Image credit: Jagex / Hi-Rez / YouTube via Xbox)
Gudi, who’d already flagged the bug with Jagex, consulted fellow OSRS expert C Engineer and landed on player housing as the ideal testbed for this bug. Player houses can include multi-combat dungeons, and when you die in one, you respawn outside the assigned house portal. This would make it easy for the attackers to be near the victim’s respawn point, and it’s also an environment where thousands of players regularly go to fight purely for fun, rightfully thinking their items are safe. There is a special attack limitation in player housing that prevents massive Ancient Godsword stacks, but the core mechanics could still be used to rob players of their items.
The thing is, as Gudi worked out, it’s not actuallydyingthat enables this delayed damage. Dying is just one quick way to get players from a safe area to an unsafe area via respawn. But even if the target player manually teleports to an unsafe area, the delayed damage could still trigger and kill them with PvP rules if their health was low enough.
“Of everything I had done up to this point, this was without a doubt the one which crossed the line,” Gudi reasons. “I did it to a real player, and while there was no chance they would actually die because it wouldn’t deal enough damage, I really did not want this bug to get leaked before it was patched.”
(Image credit: Jagex / Hi-Rez)
With the best of intentions, Gudi convinced a few folks to enter his home at low HP – purportedly to test a bug with the iconic Dharoks armor set that increases your damage when at low health, which is actually a pretty convincing smokescreen – and then use a teleport spell right as they were hit with the Ancient Godsword. Gudi teleported right along with them to collect the loot keys. The unwitting victims wound up on the receiving end of a damage bug instead, and missing some items – which Gudi naturally returned.
The list of victims included former Jagex artist Mod Alfred, who left the Old School RuneScape development team several years ago. “You actually [killed] me in your house,” a bewildered Alfred exclaims in the video. “What is Jagex doing? … That is a really good way of luring. That’s so broken. Someone could make a lot of money doing that. People could’ve made billions or trillions doing this.”
Jagex has been alerted, as have nearly 400,000 viewers on Gudi’s video, and the bug has been fixed. Ominously, Gudi teased a “potentially devastating and very similar bug” at the end of the video, so we’ll see where this goes from here. But OSRS has avoided a second Falador Massacre, even if a few people did suffer bugged PvP deaths due to player housing once again.
MMO dev explains why we rarely get to see games early following feedback on the first new skill in 17 years: “It doesn’t look finished because it’s not finished”.
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1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
1Nemesis review: “A magical sense of tension”
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2Arcs review: “A whole lot of game in a small package”
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4Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review: “The best adventure Indy has embarked on in over 30 years”
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4The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim review – “An uninspired expansion of the most iconic screen take on Tolkien”
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