Old School Runescape player goes on an emotional roller coaster after hackers strip his account of items worth 4.8 billion in gold

pcgamer.com:

Imagine what it would be like to spend hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours amassing an unparalleled fortune in a game you love, only to have it all taken away.  Heartbreaking is a big word, but I would definitely be fighting back tears (as I uninstalled). 

Pretty much that exact tragic tale has come to a suprisingly happy conclusion for self-described «giant Runescape fanatic» and content creator Darth Microtransaction: After losing every item he'd earned in Old School Runescape to hackers—which, thanks a Herculean effort and help from followers, was virtually every item in the game—he's now got everything back.

As DM explained in the video embedded above from last week, the story actually began years ago. After grinding to build up a maxed-out bank account and acquiring everything he wanted in the game, he decided to do the next logical thing and started gambling in the Duel Arena—and lost it all on 17 bad coin flips in a row. 

But when Jagex removed the Duel Arena in 2022, DM decided to start over.

«Duel Arena is cancer, and has since been cut out of the community—you actually can't do it anymore,» he said. «So when I realized, hey, my terrible gambling issue of wanting to stake my gold is gone, I'm gonna rebuild my Runescape account. And this time, surely, everything is fine.

»Even if I wanted to be stupid, I couldn't. I'll have every item in the game, I'll rebuild it, and everything will be—I'll be back to Runescape."

And so he began the process of starting over, with the goal of acquiring every single item (or as close as he could possibly come) in the game. In time, it came to pass: After spending over $1,000 plus $500 in Steam currency, and with in-game gold donations from fans of his channels, he amassed a