Old School Runescape players were using a new bug to mass-murder each other and it got so bad the game had to be taken offline
Old School Runescape is a 10-year-old MMO that's based on a 16-year-old MMO, and in light of that you might expect that it's a quiet, staid online realm where people enjoy their gaming buds and gameplay routines and nothing new ever happens. It's actually developed a reputation for just the opposite: Players keep finding new or unique things to do that wouldn't be possible (or reasonable) in a regular MMO.
The latest Old School Runescape shenanigans occurred in the wake of an update that, according to GamesRadar, made some small behind-the-scenes changes to the game. Regular maintenance stuff, really—except that after it was live, players discovered that sending «Rainbow» text in the game would crash the client. And not just their own client: Everyone who read the text would suffer the same fate.
You can probably guess what happened next. Jagex at first attributed the problem to «a crash during the Zebak fight» that impacted just one player but it quickly became clear that the situation was much, much worse than that. A few hours later the whole game was taken down so they could fix it.
Old School Runescape players, to their credit, took the downtime reasonably well. «The code behind this game is actually unreal,» redditor Kresbot wrote. «I'm sure if we took Oldschool offline somehow Big Ben would collapse.»
«Although we like building new things, recreating old functionality exactly the same in new code is hard,» redditor caustictoast said, explaining why Jagex is still running OSRS on its original code. «This game especially is notorious for spaghetti and players finding and using unintended effects. So to maintain all that quirkiness and get rid of bugs is a huge expectation.»
«The code base isn’t just based off a 20
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