Old School Runescape is a 10-year-old MMO based on a 16-year-old MMO, and because of that, one might expect a quiet, staid online realm where people enjoy gameplay with their gaming buddies and nothing new happens. But in fact it is the exact opposite: players are finding new and unique things to do, one after another, that would not be possible (or reasonable) in a regular MMO.

The latest old-school Runescape shenanigans came after an update that, according to GamesRadar, made small changes behind the scenes of the game. The update, which according to GamesRadar makes small behind-the-scenes changes to the game, is just like normal maintenance, but after the update was released, players found that sending the "Rainbow" text in-game would cause the client to crash It was discovered. And not just their own clients: everyone who reads that text suffers the same fate.

You can guess what happened next: Jagex initially described the problem as "due to a crash during a battle with Zebak," which only affected one player, but it soon became clear that the situation was much, much worse than that. Hours later, the entire game was taken down in order to fix the problem.

Oldschool Runescape players, to their credit, took the downtime reasonably well. redditor Kresbot wrote, "The code behind this game is actually unrealistic. If they took Oldschool offline, Big Ben would collapse."

"I love making new stuff, but it's hard to recreate old features in exactly the same way with new code," said redditor caustictoast, explaining why Jagex is still running OSRS with the original code." The game is particularly notorious for spaghetti and players finding and using effects they did not intend. So keeping all the quirks and getting rid of bugs is a big expectation."

"The code base is not simply based on a 20-year-old game," TheJigglyFat added, "but something the three brothers created for fun before they had any 'real' experience." When I think about the project I created with a friend in college, I couldn't imagine going back and iterating on it for 10 years, even if it was for a class."

Playing on the use of rainbow-colored text to crash the game, several redditors pointed the finger at the LGBTQ+ community rather than Jagex. The era of gay pride is over. The era of gay rage has just begun."

Many old-school Runescape players took the opportunity to reminisce about similar gong shows in the game's past, particularly a bug that allowed players to boot other players out of the game by using the μ character. 'When you enter an alt code, it crashes the game for anyone who sees it,' he said.

"The client doesn't register it, so you can get away with turning off public chat.

"I can confirm that we did it on World 2 when OSRS was just launching," Dawnside admitted." I thought it would be hilarious to boot off the flower hosts on the west bank of Varrock, but the collateral damage was immense as the all-white mini-map turned into just a handful of white dots."

That's right.

"Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and video game power corrupts instantly, and if you give MMO players the power to destroy worlds like this, you know they will use it at the first opportunity.

This is a video of that old player-deletion μ-bug in action. With the benefit of hindsight and hard-earned maturity, I think we can all agree on one thing: the μ bug is a real problem.