Old School Runescape, the antiquated version of RS Gold that still looks and plays like the game I snapped innumerable hours into when I really should've been studying, is obtaining a raid. A good raid requires good rewards, so when the Theatre of Blood was announced late last year, players were anxious to see what clearing the multi-man challenge would earn them. Jagex reacted with Justicar armor, a new best-in-slot armor set (above). There was one little problem: gamers totally hated it.
Actually they hated it so much that, for months, the Old School community dogpiled the horn on the 2007scape subreddit and memed it into hell and back. They memed on it so tough that Jagex is now completely changing the armor's design. And not just that, the artist behind the Justicar armor,"Mod West," is utilizing designs submitted and voted on by players. Almost all of Old School Runescape's updates go through player polls, but that is the first time that the suit of armor has been forged in a passion of memes. The irony is that while gamers hated the'closing' armor revealed earlier this season, they adored the prototypes shown when the raid was declared. Originally, the Justicar armor was part of a trio of armor sets, West tells me, but since the Theatre of Blood went from vague concept to actual material, the armor shifted with it. Participants said there was enough DPS equipment but not enough tank gear, so it had been narrowed down to only 1 armor collection. And if they were just going to use one set, Jagex guessed they might as well make a new one based on the armor worn by the raid's huge bad.
"We believed changing it a little made sense," West says,"but players weren't quite on board with the original proposal we shared on stream. The memes came hard and fast. Others believed the new armor didn't seem tanky enough and liberally provided a few choices, with some calling for a more extreme redesign.
It got so bad that some players started to seriously believe a meme that the upgraded armor was by another artist, which the artist who made the prototypes had abandoned Jagex. But then something amazing happened. Even as memes blotted out sunlight, gradually but certainly severe suggestions began to shine through. It began with crude Photoshop tasks, but shortly proper examples and fan art began to crop up. Players rallied around the idea of a bulkier, blessed armor set motivated by the Runescape god Saradomin, so they moved back into West's prototype designs and made a few adjustments.
And then, a hero emerged: legend_arts, a gifted and famous Runescape fan artist. Inspired from the memes and inspired by elements of West's designs andOSRS Buy Gold other players' suggestions, legend_arts created a hybrid armor design so good it not merely silenced the memes, it captured the attention of West himself.
