Last September, Sam Liu, an Australian boarding school student in his late teens, created a Facebook event: "The day I get my runescape back." The event's date — Friday, September 13th 2024 — was the day that his ban of 101,219 hours, 56 minutes and 9 seconds from the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) RuneScape was set to expire.

Pinned to the top of the event was a message from Liu asking everyone to come together on the day his lengthy ban expires and get "hyped as fuck."

What Liu did not expect was just how hyped people would get. By the beginning of October, the event grew to 76,000 attendees. As of the first week of November — well after the event was set to private— the number of people attending "The day I get my runescape back" topped out at 118,000.

In less than a month, the Facebook event grew into an off-the-wall message board dedicated to jokes geared towards, but certainly not limited to, RuneScape. All of the most popular posts took the form of joke polls and memes — often with options that involve John Cena. Many visitors wanted to know how Liu had obtained such an absurdly and specifically lengthy ban.

Why did this single event garner so much attention? Why RuneScape, the online gaming phenomenon of 2007? And why is this particular ban so absurdly long? Whatever the intentions behind this throw-away event, the result was so much more than just a niche joke — transforming into a forum for the displaced, celebrating the chaos of an Internet that no longer exists.



&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/16ceac4e86194b6d84971ce6f43e9e9b_e2868b1cf0274fdf8c84b4c4947fb945_1_post.gif" alt="" /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;



In order to understand why Sam Liu's joke Facebook event blew up, you must understand RuneScape and how it blew up. In January 2001, Andrew and Paul Gower, brothers from Nottingham, England created RuneScape, a web browser-based fantasy MMO.

At the time of its first release in 2001, it was everything a browser-based game wasn't: 3D graphics, customizable characters, open world level design, a narrative driven by completing quests and a general adherence to the fantasy tropes of Dungeons & Dragons or Lord of the Rings.

RuneScape's crude, Java-based graphics allowed the player to imagine the particulars of the world while providing an environment believable enough to immerse yourself in. Early RuneScape was charmingly janky. The game was immediately appealing for its persistent world, where players had the freedom to explore or build their characters with a lack of constrictive seriousness — a general goofiness that made it easy for players to make friends.

What's more, the barriers to entry were delightfully low. The earliest versions of the game were playable on any web browser with the appropriate Java software. Even today, RuneScape can be played on almost any computer, and the the game has always been free to play. Even with the later introduction of a premium membership, the free-to-play option is still RuneScape's main appeal. RuneScape was even awarded a place in the 2008 Guinness Book of World Records as the world's "Most Popular Free MMORPG."

Early RuneScape was charmingly janky.

Before the ubiquity of Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter, games like RuneScape — with its open chat rooms and virtual meeting places — let kids who had access to a computer, but not a car, hang out with friends and, sometimes, make new ones. The game's various quests and gameplay forced you to play and interact with these friends and strangers. The subsequent mayhem that would result, virtual or not, was just an entertaining way to spend time with other humans — silly and open ended but almost always consequence free. You could attempt a serious quest or, more often than not, just goof around. A favorite pastime was seeing how far you could get into the then unregulated Wilderness before being hunted down by a more experienced player.

Several iterations of the game have been released over the years, the most popular of which is RuneScape 2, released in 2004 and, based on player opinion, peaked in 2007. The game remained essentially the same until the 2013 release of RuneScape 3, with an HTML5 revamp that offered upgraded playability and visuals.

This is now the default version of the game, with a more streamlined focus than the previous version. While the landscape of RuneScape 3 is more detailed than RuneScape 2, it's still dated by modern standards. The quests and the narrative of the original RuneScape are still there, but the inter-player interaction is limited at the beginning of the game — alienating newer players from the wider RuneScape community. Overall, the game is less open-ended and, with upgraded graphics but the same point-and-click controls, it feels more like playing a PlayStation 2 game with poor control design than an expansive MMORPG. The rough edges have been smoothed, making it arguably even easier for new players to pick up and play, but the unvarnished charm of the old RuneScape has been polished away.

Liam Romano, who's been playing RuneScape since 2007 and was also banned for an absurdly long time, did not like the change. "I tried playing the current version of RuneScape, and I had no idea how everything worked," he says. "It was far too different, and I couldn't be bothered to learn the new game mechanics."



&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/4b5fb6fd72a34092b4f5750be6955deb_e2868b1cf0274fdf8c84b4c4947fb945_1_post.gif" alt="" /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;



RuneScape's accessibility and popularity, however, hasn't been without consequence. Over the years, and especially during its peak, RuneScape has been plagued with cheating in two forms. The first is botting, where a program automates the tedious process of resource-gathering. The second is real world trading, where players purchase various items outside of the game with actual money.

Together, the two create an atmosphere where players are incentivized to cheat in order to fully enjoy the game. And it's not an easy problem to solve: What makes the barrier for entry low for new players, also makes it easy for banned cheaters to quickly create a new account and rejoin.

Jagex, the company that owns and manages RuneScape, has attempted, many times, to curb these two types of cheating, not just out of some moral commitment to creating a totally fair game environment, but also to secure the integrity of its business, ensuring that players can't acquire something they didn't earn through time or money.

To tackle the botters, Jagex's weapon of choice is the banhammer. By 2006, moderators banned nearly 5,000 accounts for botting. In 2010, A Jagex moderator on the official RuneScape forum referred to the constant battle against bots and their attempts to avoid detection as "a bit of an arms war." In 2011, Jagex enacted a project called "ClusterFlutterer," intended to eliminate gold farming bots by identifying them within the code of the game. Jagex claims this initiative removed 1.5 million bot accounts in total. Despite this, the problem with bots has never been fully resolved.

Real-world trading, however, is harder to stop, since the illicit behavior happens entirely outside of the game. In-game it simply looks like two players trading items. In 2007, Jagex tried to curb real-world trading by making changes to the trade system — letting players only conduct trades where the value exchanged between the two parties was roughly equal — and preventing players from picking up high-value items dropped on the ground by other players, either willfully or from dying.

With these new changes, real-world traders could no longer conduct trades, nor circumvent the trading process by just dropping high-value items for their customers. Along with these changes Jagex removed inter-player fighting — an extremely popular feature — from special area known as The Wilderness.

"I know a lot of people will disagree with me," Romano told me, "but I never really liked the player killing aspect of the game, and rarely ever went into the Wilderness." An understandable stance, especially for less experienced players who could easily get taken of advantage of by much more powerful players like Blake Parrey. Parrey, who had a max-leveled character told me that he, "quit for a very long time after the Wilderness was taken from the game."

To remedy the loss of The Wilderness Jagex created the Duel Arena, a more codified version of the player-killing zone, where players could bet on fights in, well, an arena. The change was met with widespread rioting throughout the game. There was even a coordinated mass log off, which, of course, didn't prompt any response or change.

Real-world trading continued to plague the game and a battle between Jagex and users occurred again in 2008, this time in an official crackdown that led to the banning of at least 60,000 accounts.

After admitting that previous initiatives against bots and real-world trading had cost the game, "millions of players, and certainly tens of millions of dollars [for the company]," Jagex introduced Bonds in 2013 — a currency purchasable with real-world money, but tradable in game. In an accompanying blog post, the company assured players that bonds would let players "enjoy the full RuneScape experience, free of bots and gold farmers."

Just like premium memberships, Bonds were yet another attempt to create a game mechanic that rewarded dedicated players. More importantly, however, they provide another way for Jagex to monetize a behavior that worked against their initial revenue model. This was not always the way the company wanted to interact with players, with CEO Mark Gerhard having previously called microtransactions a "stealth tax."

Despite Jagex claiming that the Bonds system was met enthusiastically by the community, the company still needed to do something to win back the players they had lost with the Wilderness and trade changes from 2007. Their solution? Simply introduce a separate version of the game as it existed in its golden years. The result was Old School RuneScape (OSRS).



&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/6650a84f5d4c41fcb6f801096c4d605f_e2868b1cf0274fdf8c84b4c4947fb945_1_post.gif" alt="" /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;



The beginnings of OSRS began in December 2010, when Jagex held a referendum on restoring the capabilities of players to drop and pick up items and conduct inter-player battle in The Wilderness. 1.2 million votes were cast in three weeks with 91 percent of the players in support of the restoration.The vote's results was a mandate from the game's core user base to negate all of the changes that Jagex made to make their game fair and accessible. This overwhelming demand for the restoration of older RuneScape abilities set the community up for yet another schism, and brought them a step closer to bringing back the RuneScape of 2007.

In 2013, three long years after that initial vote, RuneScape moderators opened a follow-up poll, asking the community to vote for the release of an Old School RuneScape (OSRS): a completely playable recreation of the game as it existed in 2007. After two weeks, there were approximately 500,000 players in favor of the option to play what was then a six-year-old game. The outpouring of support convinced Jagex — who was initially planning on releasing OSRS as novelty players could pay extra for — to release the the game as a full free-to-play version.

Many current and former players describe this version of RuneScape as "glorious," the "OG," and that it, most importantly, "appeals strongly to [their] nostalgia." Jagex, too, celebrated the outpouring of positive response.

"I voted for both [Old School and regular RuneScape]," Parrey says. "The best thing Jagex does is give a lot of power to the players… [Jagex] gives [the players] options and lets them pick. The votes left the community divided but ultimately left a lot more people happy."

Despite their best intentions, Jagex has cultivated a strong anti-fanbase within their fanbase.

Since release day, Old School Runescape has been extremely popular. And for Jagex, possibly worryingly so. According to independently-tracked player data the highest number of average concurrent RuneScape players in recent years came immediately after the release of OSRS, on February 24, 2013. That Sunday, approximately 134,000 total users (split between 70,000 regular users and 64,000 OSRS users) logged on to play. Today, OSRS players consistently rival regular RuneScape players — by the end of January the split was around 53,000 to 50,000. Based on the player data, the shadow of nostalgia is slowly eclipsing the "main" game.

This trend is partly due to longtime players, like Romano, returning to what they know best. "I do think Old School is a bit of a compromise, as I really liked some of the updates that occurred during my time playing," Romano says. "I just find it too difficult to adjust to the current version."

OSRS has also attracted younger players preferring the older game, and cheaters who just find the older Java platform more accessible for bots and the atmosphere more welcoming to real-world trading.

The success of OSRS has put Jagex in the confusing position of becoming more and more reliant upon a population of users they were trying to outgrow. This is a group that actively prefers an environment devoid of the great many changes that the company has put in place in order to to make the game more attractive and fair to new players. Despite their best intentions, Jagex has cultivated a strong anti-fanbase within their fanbase



&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;img src="http://static.digg.com/images/a851124dfd3a4ff0a9331044c3d2bf05_e2868b1cf0274fdf8c84b4c4947fb945_1_post.gif" alt="" /&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;



Now, here in the 15th year of RuneScape's existence, is Sam Liu and his Facebook event: a testament to, and mockery of, RuneScape's extensive history of carefully orchestrated software updates and system adjustment. The event speaks to a fondness for a past so recent that people are only just beginning to be able to articulate its specific qualities. It's an early wave of aughts nostalgia from those who are always the first to idealize an era: those who were going through puberty at the time

He offered the following, somewhat sarcastic telling — he is a teenager, after all — of the events the lead him to start the Facebook event.

A great abyss in my life opened up when my account was banned. Life wasn't the same without RuneScape. How quickly my sadness turned to anger, anger at myself. That account was my life, and having been permanently banned I began to lose touch with the world. I spent many restless nights thinking of what could have been. Then, one day, I logged into the account and saw something amazing, a ban timer had begun! I was swept with a overwhelming sense of ecstasy, and immediately set upon creating 'The day I get my runescape back.'

This narrative of events seems stilted in a way that suggests someone speaking to a reporter who's not in on an inside joke, and by committing to the joke, Liu continues his small rebellion. An absurd act, like Liu's Facebook group, is the only way to retaliate against such a ridiculously lengthy ban with little opportunity for appeal.

As for the absurd length of the ban, there's no official explanation. Some assert that the ban will simply start all over again when the ban times out — which would then make it a permanent ban. But according to a RuneScape subreddit moderator, permanent bans are separate from a lengthy ban. There's an official RuneScape forum in which the rules of banning are discussed, but appeals are only allowed through a service email and responses are, according to anecdotal evidence, not helpful. Jagex refused to comment on or clarify their banning policy.

There's some testimony on Reddit of veteran players claiming to have been unfairly banned after seven or eight years of gameplay. Whether Liu was justly or unjustly banned, it's unlikely he would have received assistance through any legitimate forums. Discussion and appeal of someone's banning is not allowed within RuneScape's forum.

Unexplained ban notwithstanding, it's undeniable that Sam Liu's Facebook event struck a chord. When the event was shuttered in November by Facebook for unexplained reasons, it inspired an event commemorating the loss of the event and at moved Romano to create his own copycat event. "Yes, my page was inspired by the original event I saw, I thought it was a great idea," he said.

The event speaks to a fondness for a past so recent that people are only just beginning to be able to articulate its specific qualities

"The day I get my runescape back" was a bizarre and rebellious strike against — and an attempt to reform — the kind of chaotic forum that existed on the Internet back in 2007: silly, rambunctious and juvenile. It's the year in stasis that Jagex has attempted to replicate for users, and is slowly becoming more popular than the modern iteration of the game.

The company however, can simply not afford to tolerate the kind of hacking, botting, and real-world trading of 2007. Since 2013, they've invested millions in order to combat Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which Jagex CEO Mark Gerhard claimed were in direct retaliation to their efforts to curb botting and gold farming, and were still struggling with them in 2014. The company can't afford to battle with its own users for extended periods or allow users to illegally manipulate gameplay. Despite this, the numbers show that their user base is more interested in living in 2007, which, no matter how much they want it, will never return.

It's difficult to say what RuneScape's future will look like. Could it become another digital ruin but maintain a healthy active user base like Second Life, or shut down completely? If Old School RuneScape continues its growth as the current version dwindles, Jagex may face an uncomfortable decision about which version to devote the most resources to — possibly deciding to pull the plug on the version they've spent years building up.

"The day I get my runescape back" shows that there's also a place for the weird Internet of old, not just for RuneScape players, but for a number of people who had forgotten that RuneScape existed. For a brief moment, a Facebook event recreated the kind of unregulated forum that once openly thrived on RuneScape, full of tasteless jokes and stupid memes. But a Facebook event isn't built to be any kind of sustainable forum or community. You'll see snapshots of that nostalgia, a reunion of old players, but never a return of the RuneScape community that once was.

Sam Liu has probably already created a new RuneScape account. His event will persist through copycats and commemorations; an odd monument to the silly, excessive, juvenile and difficult to monetize parts of Internet.

For more feature stories like this, check out our back catalog of Digg Features. And for more stuff from Digg, head over to our Originals archive.