A lot of you are quite rightly concerned about the network connection issues that you have been experiencing over the last few weeks. We know that this has been really frustrating for you so we wanted to tell why it is happening and what we are doing.

It won’t be a surprise to any of you that the disconnections you see are being caused by attacks against our network. There are many reasons to attack our network, but the most prevalent one is to gain items from those that die. Obviously we want you to enjoy the best experience in Old School possible so the Sys Admin team have updated our London datacentre with some new equipment which has been dealing with the attacks much better. Installing the new equipment is not a small job but they are pressing forward with updating all of our datacentres around the world. They hope to have this complete in the New Year.

While this work is underway we will be making some additional game changes to better protect you from losing your items due to any further disconnections.

We have updated the death mechanics so that when you die, your items will stay on the ground for 10 minutes and only visible to the player who died. After that they will disappear. Please note that the death mechanics during PvP will not change and will remain the same as they are now for the time being. Additionally, if you enter the God Wars Dungeon boss rooms your kill count will no longer reduce.

Corporeal Beast's cave is included in this update, you will get your full 10 minutes to return to your items.

This change should help you retain your items, and help to decrease the incentive for people to attack the network. These changes will be temporary and will be removed once we have reviewed the impact of the new equipment across all the datacentres. As this change is being made for the integrity of the game, we won’t be polling it.

We will also be investigating how we can identify players who have disconnected from the servers to see if we can create a bespoke solution for each area where there is an increased risk of death through being disconnected. However, there is a lot of investigation to be done, so this may not be a quick solution.

We also think that this is the right time to talk about the possible inclusion of gravestones. This is something you have been asking for and something which would need to pass a poll before it is introduced. The questions we have for you is what functionality would you like the gravestone to have? It could have all the features of gravestones which RS3 has such as a selection of designs ranging from 5 to 15 minutes of protection, with players being able to bless them or it can have different features based on what you want. Please let us know what you are thinking regarding gravestones on the following forum thread: Network Update.

Finally, if you have any information about those responsible for attacking our network, please email us at tipoff@jagex.com so we can investigate it.

Thank you for your continued support and patience. Your game experience remaining fun is absolutely paramount to us and we promise that we will do everything we can possibly do to see these attacks come to an end.

Mods Archie, Ash, Ghost, Ian, John C, Mat K, Reach, Ronan, Weath

The Old School Team