'Explain yourself': Old School RuneScape births a new meme as bug-exploiting scoundrels lay waste to unsuspecting F2P players with gear that shouldn't exist

pcgamer.com:

In Old School RuneScape, every moment spent in the Wilderness is a risk. It's a PvP-enabled region stretching across the northern portions of the game's main continent, and whenever you're there, you're vulnerable. While the Wilderness has housed some of the game's high-end content over the years, its greatest threats are the player-killers: those who've armed and honed their characters for PvP combat. Venturing into the Wilderness means exposing yourself to a potential ambush from someone who might have been stalking those wastes for over a decade. And because death in RuneScape comes with a high cost—when you die, you lose everything in your inventory except your three most valuable items—encountering a PKer in the Wilderness could mean losing gear you worked dozens of hours for.

Luckily, there are safeguards in place to prevent free-to-play players from suffering the full range of lethality enjoyed by PKers with paid memberships. While OSRS players with memberships have access to years of members-exclusive quests, activities, and rewards (many of which easily outclass the much smaller selection of gear that free-to-play players can acquire), they can't turn that higher-quality equipment on their free-to-play peers. Equipment and spells they acquire from member content can't be equipped or used in free-to-play servers, ensuring any PvP that takes place in a free-to-play setting happens on a relatively even playing field.

At least, that's the idea. Unfortunately, some free-to-play OSRS players have recently found themselves on the receiving end of weapons that should be impossible to wield against them.

Last week, redditor Tough-Scientist7686 reported that they'd been attacked by someone using member gear while they were in the Wilderness on a free-to-play server, attaching a screenshot of the assailant's gear that, sure enough, mostly consisted of equipment that should be impossible to wear in F2P worlds.

While that screenshot wasn't exactly a smoking gun, OSRS