Twelve months ago thousands of players landed on Tutorial Island for the first time in many years. Thus the adventure of Old School began. Today Old School has flourished into a vibrant and active game with a really strong and passionate community. We are really proud of what the community has achieved during the last year and we think a big party is needed.

To celebrate Old School's first birthday, the Lumbridge Guide has convinced the Elves to open the gates of Prifddinas and hold a party. You see, the Lumbridge Guide kept hearing how players wanted to visit the city, but as the Elves were far too distracted by writing poetry, making music and other wussy things they never got around to building it. The Lumbridge Guide thinks that if there is a massive party in Prifddinas the Elves might realise what they are missing and actually start building the city.

Over the next two weeks you can visit the Lumbridge Guide or any of the Elven emissaries scattered around Gielinor who will transport you to Old School's first birthday celebration. Once there you can party with some of the NPCs that have been introduced over the past 12 months and reminisce with some really Old School monsters. There is plenty of cake for everyone and even a special birthday gift from us to you.

Aside from the birthday festivities, we've prepared a selection of updates for which you voted in Poll 16.

Ava's devices now have a 'Commune' option. This allows you to commune with your undead chicken, so you can ask it to stop gathering random metal junk while you've got it equipped.

Left-clicking on your cannon will now let you reload it, even if it isn't currently firing.

The middle mouse-button can now be used to rotate the game camera. For players who'd prefer to use that button for clicking instead, there's a new button on the Options menu to restore the previous behaviour. The volume controls have moved to a separate Audio Options panel to accommodate this.

The Slayer helm (i) and all versions of the black mask (i) now offer a 15% damage boost to Magic damage against your assigned Slayer target, like they already do for melee and Ranging.

The Slayer helm (i) now has a +3 mage attack bonus, a +3 range attack bonus and a +10 mage defence bonus.

You no longer need to wait 30 seconds when world hopping

We'll have more updates from Poll 16 next week.

Combat adjustments

Ever since RuneScape 2 launched in 2004, there's been a long-standing issue involving combat stances. When you switched from a weapon with 4 stances to a weapon with 3, such as going from a two-handed sword to a whip, the game would frequently drop you into the Defensive stance. That was because Mode 3 on a two-handed sword is Aggressive, while Mode 3 on a whip is Defensive, and the game was blindly leaving you in Mode 3. Players have often complained about this, and sometimes gained Defence XP unexpectedly as a result of it.

We've made some changes to the combat system in this update. Now, when you switch weapons, if you're not already in a Defensive stance, the game will try to make sure it doesn't put you into one.

Similarly, when you stop autocasting, the game will try not to put you in a Defensive stance unless you were using the Defensive Autocast setting.

This has involved a fairly substantial change to the combat scripts under the hood. We've done our best to check popular combinations of weapons, but we're never going to catch everything, so we strongly recommend you check the new behaviour of your weapons before your next battle. Please let us know of any issues you find.

We've also addressed some long-standing bugs with the granite maul, whereby its special attack sometimes hit the wrong target, sometimes hit through a wall, and sometimes didn't hit anything at all. Again, this required substantial changes to the item's combat scripts, so we recommend you try it out in a safe place to make sure it's working like you expect before you next go staking with it.

In other news

The Valentine's strawberries have reached their expiry date, and have been removed from the game.

The game engine team has been making adjustments following last week's rewrite of mouse-clicking. So far they've fixed the bug it introduced whereby the left-click 'Deposit' option on bank deposit boxes didn't work.

The Slayer helm's chathead model has had a green tint removed from its jaw.

Fisherman Frodi's click-zone was considerably larger than Frodi himself, spreading right across his pier. It has now been reduced (the click-zone, not the pier).

We also want to thank Mod Philip who has pulled out all of the stops and delivered a whole host of game engine updates which has allowed us to offer you more of the updates you want.

Old School Q&A

As always, tonight at 5pm GMT we'll be holding our weekly Q&A on Twitch TV. We'd love you to join us as we have even more Wilderness stuff to show you!

To talk about this update, come and join us on the forums.

Mods Ash, John C, Mat K and Reach

The Old School Team