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 redditors would soon have some undeniable proof that something foul was afoot. A day later, Tough-Scientist7686 returned with a YouTube video, recorded by someone laying waste to free-to-play players with a loadout of members’ gear contraband.
In the video, you can see the confusion from the uploader’s unsuspecting prey as they’re suddenly taking heavier attacks than anyone could reasonably deal with free-to-play gear. Onlookers begin noticing the damage numbers inflicted on the uploader’s victims, asking what strength level the player has to let them hit so hard and demanding to know what weapon they’re using.
The highlight of the video comes at around 30 seconds in. Having noticed that something wasn’t adding up, a player marches directly at the uploader. “Explain yourself,” the player says, shortly before they’re summarily executed by a rapier that shouldn’t exist. It’s comedy. It’s drama. It’s cinema. And unsurprisingly, it’s already being memed.
As for how the overpowered player killing occurred, the working theory on the OSRS subreddit is that the video’s uploader discovered an exploit allowing them to smuggle items out of the Last Man Standing PvP activity. Playable by free-to-play users, LMS is RuneScape’s take on a battle royale, teleporting players to an island where they loot for equipment and battle for survival.
Under normal circumstances, any equipment looted during a match of LMS disappears when the match ends. However, as redditors explain, some OSRS players in years past had found an exploit allowing them to maintain possession of LMS equipment by intentionally stalling the game UI with spammed inputs.
The original LMS smuggle exploit was patched soon after it was discovered. Based on the rapier-related incidents above, however, it seems like a similar exploit has resurfaced. A possible culprit was a patch that arrived last week on November 6—shortly before these unsporting player-kills were reported—which included some UI overhauls for the mobile version of Old School Runescape. We can only speculate, but it’s possible that those UI updates reintroduced vulnerabilities like those exploited by the original LMS smuggling.
RuneScape developer Jagex hasn’t announced any relevant hotfixes since the latest reports of item smuggling. In the meantime, if you find yourself in the Wilderness, keep an eye out: You might run into someone with explaining to do.