MMO dev watches in horror and awe as thousands of players dogpile 16-year-old minigame, break the game to farm XP, and get addicted to fruit
In a demonstration of the social engineering that you only get in MMOs, thousands of Old School RuneScape players – because of course it's OSRS players – have rediscovered an ancient minigame and independently repurposed it as a community event that only works thanks to animalistic strength-in-numbers tactics and a severe addiction to "sq'irk" fruits.
On February 12, 2007, RuneScape developer Jagex released a new minigame for the Thieving skill. It was called the Sorceress' Garden, and in a nutshell, it involved hiding from elemental guards and infiltrating the titular garden in order to steal and juice fruits called sq'irks.
The garden was added years before RuneScape was split into the mainline MMO and the later-revived retro version now known as OSRS – or, rather fittingly, 2007scape on the official subreddit. The minigame has gone virtually unchanged for 16 years, but that didn't stop OSRS players from randomly dogpiling it so hard that entire game worlds have buckled.
It's hard to say exactly when it was discovered, but in the past few days, a new method of cheesing Sorceress' Garden began to circulate. Players worked out that if there are enough people in the minigame, the aforementioned guards can't actually catch everyone they see, letting the lucky few totally ignore the stealth part and walk right up to the sq'irks, drastically speeding up those Thieving XP gains. With enough people, 'the lucky few' become 'the lucky most everyone,' incentivizing coordinated groups frequently called "masses" in OSRS.
Initial reports exaggeratedly claimed that this method could yield upwards of 250,000 or even 400,000 Thieving XP per hour with minimal input. Pretty much all you'd have to do is click the sq'irks and roll the
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