Old School RuneScape bug gave all players over 2 billion coins, crashing the game economy

Old School RuneScape is the popular massively multiplayer online game by Jagex. The game has had its fair share of bugs throughout its lifespan, but the one that occurred today is arguably the most disastrous one. A few hours ago, a bug in the coding caused all players to receive the maximum possible cash.

What happened

A couple of hours ago, the bug originated while Jagex was working on an upcoming update. This bug caused all dropped coin piles to be turned into 2147 million GP. That means that over 2.1 billion cash was available to any player who killed any entity that dropped coins.

As you can see in this clip, players who discovered this bug were surprised, to say the least. However, Jagex was quick to respond and took Old School RuneScape offline while they investigated the issue.

How it happened

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Jagex shared the details of the event in a blog post on their website. The bug originated when a Jagex team member was implementing code for the upcoming pickpocketing update. This update was dealing directly with coins and a new item, coin pouches. Upon death, stackable pouches were supposed to be converted into coins, but due to incorrect calculations, the item was converted into a stack of 2.1 billion coins.

How it was fixed

At the time of writing, Old School RuneScape is back online and the crisis has been resolved. I use the term resolved loosely, as Jagex’s remedy to the issue involved rolling back the entire game a few hours prior to the occurrence of the bug. This meant that many players lost all progress that they made prior to the rollback. As coins are a tradeable item and have a major effect on the in game economy, a rollback was the only logical option as manually removing the falsely generated coins is next to impossible.

There are players who exploited the bug to purchase and redeem Old School Bonds for membership. Jagex said that these memberships will be removed as they were gained illegitimately. Jagex has acknowledged that this is their fault and have apologised.